


No Rest for the Dead, No Peace for the Living

by bewaare



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe, Body Horror, F/F, F/M, Ghosts, Haruno Sakura-centric, Kekkei Genkai | Bloodline Limit, M/M, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-16
Updated: 2016-09-09
Packaged: 2018-03-30 20:49:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 16
Words: 61,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3951256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bewaare/pseuds/bewaare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>CURRENTLY UNDER REVISION. CHAPTER EIGHT UPDATED.</p><p>There have been three people since the formation of the Haruno clan with their kekkei genkai. Sakura is the third. She can see ghosts.</p><p>Dead men have tales to tell and she is the only person who can hear them speak, and she is the only person in konoha who knows all of its secrets and can see its streets filled with its countless dead. Sakura is the only one who knows the real cost of war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Point Of No Return

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakura’s skin reddens under the faucet and a hand, not hers or her mothers, turns it off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NARUTO is © Masashi Kishimoto. UPDATED!

Ghosts are funny things.

Sakura has always been able to see them, she thinks so anyway, as they drift through the streets of her home. When she was younger, sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. At first, when she could tell, they were terrifying with their jaws hanging off in unnatural ways, their limbs missing, their chests or stomachs open, their heads little over half, a shoulder or a hip crushed into oblivion. There are others of course, who are elderly or pale and sickly. They are playful and happy to pet passing cats and the old woman at the corner always waves at Sakura on her way to the academy every morning.

It’s the ones who don’t speak who frighten Sakura. Their eyes roll and their forms twist unpleasantly, as if being human hurts them, but they never hurt her and she learns to wander closer and listen to them as they pass air through their empty throats. They feed the birds and the ones with bits of face missing can’t tell her their names. She gives them new ones instead.

Kaoru is the one who follows Sakura, drifting along where she ought to have legs so Sakura is about eye level with the twisted pelvis that ends at the hips. They play chess and Kaoru always feeds the crows. They pick at Sakura’s hair and clothes the first few times, cawing at her and dancing just out of reach, but then they start to bring gifts as crows do. Sakura has a collection of small sparkly rocks and little lost baubles.

Konoha is full of ghosts with no names. They wander about like children, like something important has been ripped from them and they’ve lost the ability to be people. Sakura tries to name as many as she can, but there are _so many_. Hundreds of thousands of civilians, and shinobi, and _children_. They cry out at night sometimes, a rising wail that keeps Sakura up the whole night as she watches them converge under the dim lanterns and flickering streetlights. She wonders what it sounds like to everyone else, if they can even hear it. It must sound like the wind, like a distant storm.

Their cries fill in the hollow space between midnight and dawn and are what first form the idea when she can’t sleep, huddled beneath her sheets with the windows latched tight to keep the howling out. Sakura pulls her teacher aside when she turns seven. She tugs on his sleeve until he takes her to the side of the room and kneels down to get on her level and smiles warmly when she frowns in determination.

“Help me apply to the shinobi academy,” she demands.

That pleasant smile drops off his face and into a thousand foot pit, deep creases in his face suddenly come to the forefront and make him jagged and haggard and his eyes, always warm and brown are suddenly hard and flinty and remind her of the ice storm that struck the village two years before. Sakura frowns and clenches her hands and stares him down. The teacher’s voice is soft, pleading.

“Why would you want to be a kunoichi, Sakura-chan?”

It’s automatic, a learned reaction from listening to the adults in the markets. “Shinobi,” she corrects.

The teacher, for all he’s no longer a teacher of children and now a keeper of secrets and bad memories (like the limp he can’t really hide and the way he favors his left hand), smiles at her with gentle wistfulness that, when she remembers it later, will drive a nail into her heart. He brushes his hands across his knees and repeats his question, amended. “Why do you want to be a _shinobi_ , Sakura-chan?”

Sakura considers her answer, weighing the prospect of a half-assed answer or a straight lie with the unbelievable truth that squirms in her brain. Sakura lifts her chin and decides honesty. It hasn’t ever failed her before. “The ghosts make me sad, I want to protect them,” she pauses, forehead crinkling and adds, “ _before_ they’re ghosts.”

It’s so blissfully simple an answer that her teacher, for an entire four minutes, has nothing to say to it. When he does, his eyes go flat. His stare is direct, his hands find her shoulders like surprisingly firm dead weights, and he draws her toward him until they’re very close and his voice is low. “Sakura-chan, are you telling me you can see _ghosts_?” There’s no urgency in his tone but it strikes her as intentionally relaxed, offsetting the tightness in his jaw and shoulders.

Sakura, nothing if not observant, feels suddenly that maybe she should have lied but nods anyway. There’s no going back in her mind.

Her teacher stands. “Come with me please,” he requests and holds out his hand for her to take.

After a moment, she does and instantly feels a little better when he squeezes it gently and pokes his head back into the classroom to tell the others that they’ve been released early. The deafening cheers of her classmates follow them down the hall. When he doesn’t say anything, Sakura marks her teacher’s silence with a spike of anxiety and glances at him with growing frequency as they pass the gate that surrounds the academy yard. The hard lines in his face look different when he stands straight, a little more slanted. The shadows have been washed away by the easy afternoon sun. Sakura, though unconscious of it, notes the difference and files it away while she says nothing to him about it and squeezes his hand.

When he looks down at her she asks, “Where are we going?” in an even tone. Nothing in it, according to her own mostly honest estimation of her ability to lie to adults, suggests her very real fear.

“The hokage tower,” he says with an even smile and wrinkles at the edges of his eyes. His gaze remains steady and he winks at her. Nothing in it suggests a falsehood.

Biting her lip, Sakura wonders if her estimation of _his_ ability to lie to her is honest _. Still_ , she thinks, _he didn’t say the hospital_.

There is very little research available on genetic memory, though whether this is due to there being little material or a portion of it being classified she doesn’t know and doesn’t waste time wondering about. What she does know is that whether or not modern research supports it, she’s certain she’s experienced it. As it turns out, seeing ghosts is hereditary. At least, in the Haruno clan.

A gene exists inside her so recessive it has surfaced only three times in history, as far as is recorded in the village history. It remains likely that there were others who simply never spoke out and, if there were a great many who never did so and the number of those who came to attention stayed small it would explain why Sakura never came under any suspicion. If she had been, she would know. Ghosts see no point in hiding things. As it is, the last three members to express their abilities were all prominent members of the village’s elite—though only from the shadows and known to very few. It is for this slim possibility that her clan remains in the confines of Konoha. The clan trade is simply a beneficial side effect of their proximity and desire to flourish in areas other than slim probability and the humdrum of violence.

Sakura finds herself pleasantly pleased by the fantastical truth every bit as unbelievable as her own, visible ability which feels as much as it has always felt like something from a book or a carefully written legend pulled from a dusty tomb.

The hokage takes one long, measured look at her and her gangly growing limbs and her glossy hair that pushes beneath her waist, and then he smiles and taps out his glowing pipe. What falls out is more leaf than ash. With a flick of one thin, gnarled hand, he summons a faceless guard from the shadows and speaks softly to them. There are tests to run, psychological, physical, some invasive and some not. Sakura bears them all.

The last is the one that puts her in an uncomfortable metal chair with a high plain wooden table between her and another, empty chair. Her back is to a massive window that allows in the slowly setting sun. It throws a faint wash of purple and gold across the floor. To her right the door opens and a tall, broad shouldered man with dark skin and thick scars roping around his face, head, neck, and the small patch of visible skin between his sleeve and gloves Sakura sees when he pulls the empty chair from the table. Much in the way as the others, his demeanor is soft and pleasant. It feels intentional from him, like his friendly greeting could turn to knives between the space of her heartbeats.

Ghosts follow him in, smiling toothlessly and rearranging his things when he isn’t looking. In his right hand he carries a heavy bag like a doctor that carries the very faint smell of blood and sterilized metal. Sakura pushes her lips into a smile. The man across from her is a torturer. She doubts very much he is here to torture her, but the fact that his presence jars so sharply with the rest of her day is what forces her to uncurl her hands and refold them limply in her lap to distract herself. The ghosts push his bag closer to his chair when he sets it down to sit. When he reaches down to pick up, it will be right under his hand instead of six inches too far to the right. Ghosts have to try hard to touch things so Sakura knows that they like him. It probably means he’s a good man, profession aside.

“Hello little one,” he greets, voice rough like gravel rubbing against bare skin.

Sakura smiles at him. “Hello,” she replies.

“So, I hear you can see ghosts,” he begins.

As far as openers go, and in comparison to the countless others she’s heard today, the undecorated directness is refreshing and eases her shoulders some. He folds his hands together on the table. There are scars on his wrists that twist upwards beyond her ability to see and three ghosts hovering over his shoulders. They wink at Sakura and grin with empty mouths. Sakura wonders if they are friends or victims killing him with kindness.

“Yes,” she answers, still looking over his shoulder.

The man blinks and his brows rise, as if he isn’t expecting her to just give up the answer without any prompting. If she were in a cell instead of the open well-lit room she would have expected him to openly express his skepticism about her honesty and virtue. “Well,” he says finally, “I’m supposed to examine you. I’m—,”

Recognition sinks in finally. The torturer— _interrogator_ , she corrects herself silently with no small trace of wryness—across from her is the head of one of the ANBU Intelligence Divisions. Another irrational prick of fear trickles down her spine. The ghosts, rather than drift around the edges of the table, ooze straight through the wood to get to her and run their hands across her face and down her back. The man’s eyes widen just a fraction. Sakura realizes that her hair must be twisting oddly in a sealed room with no free breeze, a sight for any overanalyzing non-believer. The ghosts doing their best to ease her discomfort is serving another, more practical purpose. They are unwittingly building up her case.

A stray thought crosses her mind. _I should have_ lied, she thinks weakly. It is a sudden and not bittersweet lesson about the double-edged sides of truth and the virtues of dishonesty. Mostly her mouth tastes sour. It is too late now. The decision has been made, the tests run, the torturer sits across from her.

“Morino Ibiki,” Sakura whispers before he can finish.

Those thin brows rise again. Sakura bites her lip.

“I read a lot,” she says, “history, theory, whatever really. I’ve memorized the bingo books going back ten years.” It is not entirely the truth. A half-lie seems the easiest way to ease into her newfound desire to keep her secrets to herself.

If anything, he looks amused. His eyes are still tracking the odd movement of her hair, but the tension in his face is gone and has been replaced by something she can only describe as calculating. The edges of his mouth are quirked crookedly. It isn’t an expression she’s overly familiar with. Sakura waits him out. She can do this. These are the consequences— _her_ consequences—to her decision. She will not waver. There’s no point.

Now that she knows him, knows what he does, then she knows what the test is and who, likely, will perform it. The man who pulls information from between the teeth of unwilling traitors and enemies won’t likely use the same techniques on a child who has, as far as anyone knows, done nothing wrong except, maybe, lie. Which means…

“You’re going dig around in my head, aren’t you?” she asks, voice flat.

The worst she’s ever done is steal more than her fair share of cookies from her mother’s roaming cookie jar, but Sakura lives in a village of killers. She’s only seven but even she knows the price of knowing too much. There are eleven examples of the consequences of dipping too far into the pot just along her street, at least seventeen more in the district, and an unknowable number stumbling through the buildings and streets of her city.

The _Interrogator_ nods.

“Okay,” she whispers. “Okay,” she repeats, stronger, raising her eyes to meet his.

There’s approval there, surprised and pleased. Sakura is only seven, after all. Ibiki stands and makes the decision to walk around the left side of table to kneel at her side. When he speaks his voice is surprisingly soft. “I can’t actually do it myself,” he admits with a rueful grin, “but somebody you already know is going to do it for me, okay?”

Suspicion confirmed, Sakura nods. It doesn’t matter if she actually is okay with it or not. She’s come this far.

“Okay.” He turns and raises his voice. “Come on then!”

The door opens again and swings in slowly, a familiar pale yellow head peeking in around it. Sakura feels her stomach settle. When his eyes drift over her, she smiles and waves weakly at Yamanaka Inoichi. Ino’s father. Of course. When he grins at her and comes into the room, she gives him a little wave.

“Hello Sakura-chan,” he greets, suddenly warm and familiar. Despite this, Sakura is struck by the sudden idea that he is no longer the father of her friend but a man with a medical degree and an examiner.

Sakura isn’t sure if this makes her feel better, but it doesn’t make her feel any worse about the whole thing. She takes it as a win.

The swell of vague comfort doesn’t last, though, because when they said they were going to dig around inside her head they meant it quite literally. Sakura has known about the Yamanaka clan ability for as long as she and Ino have been friends, but she’s never been able to experience it first hand until now and hasn’t really quite understood what it means to have someone dip their essence into a place it doesn’t belong. The shudder of sudden intimacy causes her spine to stiffen and her hands to clench. It is as much of a violation as it would be without her consent. Sakura restrains a gasp as she feels Inoichi begin his rooting, shuffling through her thoughts as though flipping through paperwork. The awareness of him is sharp, needles in every pore. Inoichi turns to sorting through her memories in a manner not unlike her family accountant sorting through yearly records.

When her initial assessment proves correct—that her personal secrets aren’t of any real interest—she turns her energy to concealing as many village secrets as she can without attracting attention. There are too many to effectively hide them all and it wouldn’t matter even if she could, because to sort through all of them would take Inoichi months of rooting around in her mind and would likely render her little more than a vegetable. Still, his methods are clipped and efficient. Sakura finds it hard to reconcile the image of him as a father and the new understanding of his job description, a thought she’s very sure he absorbs. He doesn’t mention it, however, because he’s found what he’s looking for.

Nestled beneath the hippocampus is an extra section of her brain present only in individuals with bloodlines present, the makeup of which can help determine if the abilities it generates are passive, active, or some combination of both. Inoichi’s thoughts become a scalpel instead of hands and Sakura cannot hold back the sharp exhale his touch elicits, though she knows that it draws Ibiki’s direct focus back to her. Sakura’s eyes hold desperately to something invisible over the man’s shoulder. Inside her, the small ghost riding inside her skin vibrates furiously and warms the chill forming in her bones. Behind her, inside and out, Inoichi’s skin pales and grows damp. The ghost inside her sinks her claws into his mind in return. His mind flees suddenly, slamming back into its body with enough force to cause him to sway and clamp one clammy hand onto the back of Sakura’s chair.

Sakura’s gaze drifts from the invisible ghost to Ibiki’s hard eyes. Though his hands are lax on the table, laced almost lazily, Sakura knows that they could become the opposite of harmless in less time than she could register to save herself. Inoichi draws in several stuttering breaths, running a hand down his face several times. It’s a tic, a motion meant to ground himself back in his own body after extended interrogations, a motion she’s seen him do before but never understood. He turns to Ibiki and nods.

“It’s there,” he says. When his eyes flick to Sakura, he hesitates but adds, “And there’s… there’s something else there, too.”

Curious. Clinically assessing. “What?” Ibiki asks.

“I don’t… know,” Inoichi confesses, not looking at Sakura and not letting go of the back of her chair.

She can’t see his hand, but she imagines that his knuckles are white and creaking. Ibiki is staring at her blandly from across the table, doing his very best poker face but Sakura is nothing if not observant and can track the almost imperceptible glimmer of hard curiosity there. She smiles at him, aware it looks forced, aware that it does nothing to lower his guard.

“I was supposed to be a twin,” she tells him. “She died before I was born.”

A stillbirth in her mother’s womb. Strangled before she had a real chance while they were very small, barely sentient, with nowhere else to go. The construct, only half independent, is anchored inside Sakura’s head. It could have anchored anywhere, or could have drifted aimlessly until it faded into nothing, but its desire to live had been strong enough to force the ghost into its still-living sister. There were more than siblings now, of one mind and a single body. It had been too young to struggle for dominance when its life had failed and any resentments it kept to itself, nothing more than a cold part of Sakura’s mind that whispered to her when the room was quiet and the ghosts loud. How could it have taken control? What did a ghost who had never even been a child know of independence? Of self? Of _living_?

Neither man seems comforted by this revelation anymore than Sakura is comfortable with the presence inside herself, but they remain quiet. Inoichi’s skin is still pale, still a little clammy. Doubtless his mind is reeling from the sensation of a sharp mind pushing back against his, of the shock of being thrust from a host. If Sakura has learned anything from Ino, it’s that being rejected _just doesn’t happen_. Likely, there is no comfort for such a breach of confidence. The hand on the back of her chair slips away to lock with the other behind Inocichi’s back.

“There’s no denying she has a bloodline and, well, I feel it’s safe to say what it is. There’s little doubt,” he reports through tight lips. “She has the clan’s heritage.”

The sudden chill Sakura understands. If she’s honest, she can hardly blame him, so when he walks around the table toward the door she catches his glance back and smiles warmly at him. It grows some when he gives her a weak wink, mind in turmoil. A solid, family man, he knows that children are sensitive to the emotions of the adults around them and that any aversion he may now have for a sentient being totally separate to her is irrational. Sakura doesn’t begrudge him the gut-reaction, confident he will work through it. After all, he’s a family man. A solid, dependable sort. A pushover. Beside her, Ibiki reaches into his coat and withdraws a small scroll. Sakura waits while he carefully pries the seal off with a gloved hand and unrolls it before her, reading aloud the early romance between her clan and the formation of her village.

Here her suspicions about the transparency of her clan’s rate of producing those with the family ability are formed. The number of early clan members who became priests due to a heightened sensitivity to the supernatural, ghosts, spirits, demons, paints a suspicious picture for both her and the individual who wrote the account now presented to her. Those who came from over the sea in the first years were often avoided for their odd, otherworldly natures. A nature that Sakura herself has often found herself exhibiting while alone or speaking with strangers in no danger of crossing paths with either her or her family again.

“Well then,” Ibiki says finally, “congratulations. You have a bloodline limit.”

It feels strange to be inducted into the most elite ranks of her society, especially given the expediency of the process which takes less than a few days filled almost entirely with paperwork. Sakura knows that the power structure of her village relies heavily on the upper house members of powerful clans. Their contributions to the coffers, security, and culture of the village force a mutually beneficial relationship that allows well-liked hokages to execute absolute authority in occasions where their decisions are backed by the majority of clan leaders. Should the clans and the hokage oppose the council, they overrule them by sheer force. Similarly, should the council and the clan heads band together, they overpower the hokage’s rulings. Sakura has seen it before, painted in blood, in the empty complex where her classmate sleeps alone in cold buildings that creak with the heavy feet of too many ghosts.

The apprehension that fills the room is understandable and Ibiki understands this better than some might, and because he understands he says nothing for a long while and expects no answer from the small seven year old with the stern and distant expression looking very small in her uncomfortable metal chair. The ghosts coo softly and swarm around Sakura, their hands faint pressure on her shoulders, her hair, her face. Anxiety struggles to overwhelm her. The soothing presence of her passenger ghost rises up suddenly, yellow and warm, to shroud her fears with a gentle envelopment of easy thoughts. Sakura takes in a shuddering breath and looks into Ibiki’s blank expression.

“What now?” she asks.

He tilts his head. “You want to be a shinobi.” It isn’t a question but a well-based assumption. A confirmation of what he either already knows or strongly suspects.

“Yes,” she confirms.

With a grimly humorous expression, he stands and rubs a hand down his face. “You just got your ticket kid,” he tells her and reaches for his bag. It’s exactly under his hand. Ibiki frowns down at the handle in his grip, glances beneath the table to the empty spot next to his chair where he left it, expression one of continued exasperation with his reality. Likely, the extensive torture he’s given and received lead him to believe he simply no longer had a firm grip on his own experiences or memories, but when he glances suspiciously up at Sakura and finds her expression one of total openness and gentle innocence his face pinches. The carefully calculated expression alters the path of his previously accepted conclusions. Ibiki grips the handle and stands, testing the weight in his hand.

Around them the ghosts chitter and Sakura’s expression melts some into delight. She doesn’t tell him outright even when he glances at her again, wholly, viciously suspicious, and she only blinks up at him with large eyes and smiles. Ibiki hefts his bag and leaves her, closing the door softly behind him with a low click. Less than three minutes later an attendant enters with officiating seals that require blood and lots of reading. They’re little more than formality. The attendant escorts her out.

Three days later school lets out for summer and Sakura opens her door after three swift knocks to an ANBU with a small parcel. In two months the academy will see her in class.

“Thank you,” she whispers to them.

They give her a two fingered salute, ruffle her hair because she’s young with an open face and they’re warmer than some others giving out letters today, and vanish. There’s no smoke, no leaves, no swirl of air. They’re just gone. Sakura closes her jaw but can’t force her eyes to return to normal size, instead her brain churns as she wonders the viability of her learning that art. It must be an ANBU thing.

“Sakura?” her mother asks, coming in from the living room. “Who was that?”

Sakura turns with an outrageous expression on her face, she only knows it’s outrageous because her mother’s brows rise and she starts for her daughter with open concern and amusement. Before her mother can envelop her in a bone-crushing embrace, Sakura holds out the letter. Stopped short from her daughter, her mother takes it and flips it open. Her expression is at least eleven times more outrageous than Sakura’s when she finally looks up at her daughter.

Sakura has the biggest grin she’s ever managed.

Her mother just looks exasperated. “Honey?” she calls.

From the other room Sakura’s father rumbles and, after a pause, appears in the doorway. He’s a bear of a man, tall with broad shoulders and a belly to boot and Sakura loves him more than she has ever loved anything else because he has never denied her anything she has been willing to work for. Her mother stands solidly at his shoulder with wide shoulders and wide hips, hair a vibrant yellow, expression caught evenly between exasperation and open affection when she hands him the letter without a word. He reads it silently.

“You want this?” he asks. “You really, really want this?” he kneels when Sakura approaches and leans closer to take her shoulders with his enormous hands. “You’re willing to work as hard as you can, do whatever you must, kill—,”

“Honey!” her mother interrupts but he holds up a hand, undeterred.

“She wants to be a shinobi. She has to know what it means,” he says, carefully taking hold of Sakura’s shoulders again, grip loose but heavy.

Sakura is seven and stubborn and smarter than anyone in her class, except maybe Shikamaru but she gets better test scores than him (if that counts for anything). Her hair is long, glossy, and her skin soft. She has a tendency to wrinkle the spot between her brows and nibble the side of her lips when she’s thinking and she’s almost always thinking, working out how to be cleverer than anybody else and how to learn more than any of her classmates. She balls her fists and spreads her feet and stares straight into her father’s eyes.

“You’re willing to kill for this? Die for it?” he asks, very serious in ways that he has never been. Behind him her mother hovers, hands worrying her dress into a mess of wrinkles.

Sakura’s fists are tight, her stance balanced, her brow wrinkled, her eyes ablaze with determination to have her way. “Yes,” she says, because there are too many ghosts roaming the streets, and too many of them are children, and too many of them are the parents of children who have been forgotten and left to fend for themselves with varying degrees of success, and too many of them died knowing they were alone.

“Okay then,” her father says, standing. He puts a hand on her head, ruffles her hair, then grows serious once more but not so serious that he doesn’t manage a teasing, lopsided grin. “You better start training then. Have to be better than your stinky classmates, after all.”

Her mother sighs loudly and steps around her husband to gather up her daughter in a lingering embrace and sigh again, noisily and messily because this is a funeral. Of sorts. Sakura is giving up on being a child. She is giving up the privilege to enjoy her youth and retain it for as long as she can, and accepting that one day she will be forced to kill someone and maybe they will be a child too. It is a funeral because Sakura will no longer be a gentle woman but a weapon. Because this is where her innocence ends.

Shinobi means many things, but most of all it means that Sakura will no longer be Sakura for herself.

She doesn’t tell her mother that she has never been Sakura for herself, that she has always existed for the half-visible figures that become solid when she looks at them and cry out at night and sound like the wind over an empty plain. She doesn’t say that she has already seen the worst of what death has to offer and it isn’t that bad. She doesn’t say that she no longer has nightmares of shinobi without legs or without heads and that the crows that come to leave her presents do so because of a woman who is little more than a torso and a head. She doesn’t say that she’s fairly certain that her innocence has been eroding away for years. The clan heads who gossip in the markets and play board games that last days together when the shadows of twilight hide the pieces that move by themselves.

Sakura doesn’t say any of this as she wraps her arms around her mother’s shoulders, lets her cry into Sakura’s hair, keeps her eyes steady on her father’s solid frame. One day she will see them out of the corner of her eye. One day they will wander the streets and maybe they will be nameless too, missing parts of themselves.

Maybe one day they won’t recognize her.

Sakura asks, “Do you know anyone papa? Any trainers?”

He lifts a finger to his chin, taps it, holds it out, and says, “Maybe. Just a maybe though. Why don’t you help your mother cook dinner and I’ll see if that maybe can be a yes?”

Her mother stands and brushes off her dress, runs her hands through Sakura’s hair, along her face, under her chin, kisses her forehead, and then claps her hands together. “Okay!” she declares, scrubbing her face with the back of her hand. “What do you want for dinner?”

Scrunching up her face, Sakura grins. “Rice balls!” she shouts.

Her father laughs that whole belly laugh of his and her mother sighs dramatically, letting her hands fall to her sides and shaking her head. Sakura claps her hands together and sings, _rice balls, rice balls, rice balls_ while her mother turns to fill a pot with water and her father turns toward the door. It opens quietly and he ambles out without a word. Sakura watches him go as her mother lights the stove.

Tomorrow the hokage will send another ANBU, a more formal one with seals and letters and signed papers, and her parents will have to see the truth, but today their daughter is just a little girl who has decided that she will protect people even at the cost of herself. Today their daughter is just a pure spirit, a noble goal, an ideal. Today they are just a family of civilians.

Sakura tucks her hair behind her ears and gets on her tip-toes to wash her hands. Her mother sets the pot to boil. Sakura watches her mother’s hips sway to a gentle song she hums as she pulls spices down from the cabinet and fetches a sack of rice from the pantry. The water runs hot over Sakura’s hands. Her mother measures rice and Sakura wonders suddenly, if she could have been happy like this forever. If she couldn’t see ghosts, would she be a civilian until she was a merchant until she was a clan head? Would she have married and had children? Would she one day replace her mother at the stove and her father in the smoking room?

Sakura’s skin reddens under the faucet and a hand, not hers or her mothers, turns it off. Outside crows tap playfully against the window. They have gifts. Above them the sky is dark with a gathering storm. Beyond the shut glass the ghosts are moaning. They will cry out tonight, their voice a single wail that will keep Sakura awake. The crows do a dance for her. Sakura swallows and clenches her hands and wonders about a life she will never have.


	2. Fated for Disaster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Anyone but the Uchiha Survivor, the Kyuubi Container, and Son of the White Fang,” Sakura tells him, “together,” she adds, hands tightening on her cup, “on the same team.” UPDATED!

Things are in motion.

“As of today, you are all shinobi of Konoha.”

It’s a big announcement. _The_ announcement. With it comes the expected surge of elation and heavy air of smugness of the children who have passed their exams, who have managed to kick and claw their way to the very bottom rung of the shinobi ladder. The announcement is delivered and met with a certain grandeur, meant to encourage and reward the efforts of its recipients. There are fewer than Sakura expected, though over half the class sits in the ascending rows of desks with her, but she knows that of all the hidden villages Konoha’s standards for new gennin are perhaps the lowest. Those who didn’t make it are a byproduct of the indolence that comes from peace. Sakura envies them.

Her hands curl and uncurl on each knee, flexing anxiously as the dull roar of her former classmates fills the room with generous appreciation and self-congratulation. The feelings in the room and in herself are a mixed bag. Her own are muddled with the furious celebration echoing in her head as her sister pumps her fists and pats herself on her back for being an excellent source of support and inspiration and her own trepidation when considering the future that has yet to come. Around her lounge ghosts who have gathered to see her graduation. They are pleased, though some more than others. A few are hardly human, their forms twisted and sometimes entirely without solid shape, their thoughts equally lacking in lucid design. Past their awkwardly shaped pride, Sakura can discern little about their feelings.

The emotions of her silent and invisible audience have begun to dull her own, an unexpected side effect of her ability that went mostly unnoticed when she was younger. Children, though passionate, have an unrefined sense of emotion. Sakura’s own were already oddly stunted, though neither she nor anyone else seemed to think it was anything more than a natural bookish quiet. After all she spent the vast majority of her time in the library by herself. Now though, surrounded with budding peers beginning to exhibit gradually maturing emotional depth, she finds herself having to fake emotional responses and carefully measure their output.

When Ino bumps shoulders with Sakura and grins, leaning there for a moment with the bare skin of their arms pressed together, the latter amends her earlier thought. The merciless teasing Sakura received as a child—though leaving Sakura herself largely unaffected—did not go unnoticed by everyone. Ino had noticed. Ino had come in closer, flowers in her pale blond hair, cheeks ruddy with the thought of reaching beyond her already forming social sphere. The other girl’s touch now reminds Sakura that, dulled senses or not, she _is_ excited.

The voices of their classmates still resound about the small classroom, popping softly in Sakura’s ears and overpowering their teacher’s voice even as it raises in increments to be heard over the raucous din. Ino’s thigh and arm are pressed against hers. Sakura watches her friend raise a flighty hand to tuck a wily tuft of hair back behind her ear, pausing there thoughtfully as if considering something of immense weight. Sakura wrinkles her nose, lips quirked, guessing her friend’s thoughts. Likely, dinner with her inevitable new team. Ino is substantial, solid, impractically real in a way that the ghosts Sakura moonlights with are not and never will be, and even just the understanding that people will be there if she wants to reach out and touch them is just the right amount of grounding and terrifying. Sakura leans her head against Ino’s shoulders and thrusts her nose in the air, eliciting laughter.

Iruka has lost control of the group and he knows it. Scowling he crosses his arms and taps a single foot in a slow, repetitive rhythm that he uses to try and fight the proud grin threatening to stretch his face because the unbridled joy is infectious. How could he resist such easy and innocent celebration? With a deeper scowl, he gives in. Sakura can see his shoulders ease even as he still struggles to school is features into something a little less pleased and a little more stern. It’s a losing battle, both on his expression and with the children, so he finally raises his hands high and shouts as he claps thunderously a few times. There is still work to be done. Teams to place together, jounin to assign, hitai-ate to pass out among them. When he speaks, he begins with teams.

“Team 7, Uzumaki Naruto, Haruno Sakura, Uchiha Sasuke.”

The news is a dull thud against her senses.

Naruto managed to muddle through despite his abysmal test scores and poor performance, but Sakura is the only one in her class who knows what happened to give him his passing grade. They whispered to her, some of the older, fainter ones, with excited voices. _Too much chakra and too little control_. Sakura had filed it away but remembers it suddenly as she watches him perk to attention, remembers his secret. Naruto will likely never have the control she does. He will also, however, make up for it with raw strength and reservoirs of chakra so deep that Sakura is sure no one will ever reach the bottom of them.

Sasuke, however while not nearly as clever as she is, spent his years in the academy excelling in his performance skills both general and combat based. Average control, average reserves, unusually determined, excellent practice of theory. The best fighter in the entire class, though his finesse is the only thing that saves him from Naruto’s perfected brawling technique that Sakura suspects has saved his life on more than one occasion from an overzealous villager. 

Sakura knows about Sasuke’s secret too, about the empty house that rattles and creaks with hollow voices that sound like the wind. She knows about the stain in the main house that won’t come out. About the rows of empty houses in the compound. The elite leaders all know that she knows, though they don’t know just how much of the whole story she knows, and have sworn her to secrecy about the incident.

Sakura has read the sealed file, has been briefed by ROOT.

Sakura has met the family.

_Dead men tell no tales_ , an Uchiha elder had laughed once. _I’ll tell you the tale that we died for, little girl, come here and listen._

An entire clan, decimated by one of their own in a single night and Sasuke the only survivor.

An entire clan planning a coup and murdered for it.

When she learns the truth, she finds it is not the first time she feels betrayed by the people who hold her life in their hands. She knows it will not be the last. Sakura visits the compound sometimes, when Sasuke is away because he can’t bear to stand in those empty and endless hallways alone, and listens to the secrets that the ghosts give freely.

The team, theoretically balanced is balanced by numbers only and Sakura knows that Iruka knows it because he frowns at the paper and frowns deeper when he catches her eye. Sakura is frowning too. Of all the teams, most of which will flourish, it is the only one that looks stupendous on paper. It is the only one Sakura is convinced will fail. Next to her Ino squeals in jealousy and nearby Naruto cries out in frustration. Sakura holds Iruka’s gaze, willing him to change it silently, to disobey what she suspects are the hokage’s direct orders, to do what is best for his best student. This is not a team she would have chosen.

Hatake Kakashi is not a jounin-sensei she would have chosen either.

Sakura meets the hokage later that day and asks if he’s finally gone senile in many more words, calm and polite as she kneels before him in a clean white dress and accepts a cup of tea. He frowns at her and she frowns back with her eyes and a placid smile. The disrespect is earned. The hokage is a tired old man, both too soft and not soft enough, but he respects Sakura’s opinion when she feels need to give it.

After all, Haruno Sakura is the only person in the village that knows the sum total of its secrets.

“Who would you prefer?” the hokage asks, taking a cautious sip from his cup.

“Anyone but the _Uchiha Survivor_ , the _Kyuubi Container_ , and _Son of the White Fang_ ,” Sakura tells him, “together,” she adds, hands tightening on her cup, “ _on the same team_.” It is hard to be polite when you, quite literally, know everything. “Have you ever met them? This is a disaster waiting to happen and you _know_ it.” _I don’t understand why you gave this order_ , she continues silently. _Convince me it was the right decision_.

The hokage sighs and puts his cup down. Sakura follows suit. She’s too worked up to stomach anything anyway.

“Where else can I put them? The three most powerful gennin in the village, or” he amends, “at least with the most potential and the only jounin capable of keeping them in check.”

It occurs to Sakura that the hokage, in his age and belief that he is a source of infinite wisdom, might not actually grasp the depth of what could go wrong with the scenario he has created. Carefully folding her hands in her lap, she stares at a space beyond his shoulder. “You are aware of the true nature of the massacre,” she says. He does, obviously, because he ordered it. “You are aware of what transpired between Sasuke and his brother, yet you don’t think that maybe that could affect Sasuke in a negative way that can’t be controlled. You are assuming that Sasuke will not become a loose cannon.” _Naruto too_ , she thinks but does not say.

The hokage rubs his face. “What would you have me do? Lock him up? Seal his chakra? Prevent him from becoming a shinobi?”

Sakura’s jaw sets. There are traitors in the streets of Konoha. Murderers. Men, women, and others hailed as heroes with enough blood on their hands to flood the village with blood. They are cautionary tales. They are necessary evils. Sakura doesn’t have to tell the hokage _yes, lock him up he’s dangerous_ because he can see it in her eyes. The hokage respects her opinion but only to a point.

He sighs. “I won’t do that, he’s just a child.”

_No he’s not_ , Sakura thinks as she stares straight ahead and curses him for being old and sentimental. _You’re a fool for thinking otherwise._ She smiles at that space behind him and stands. “Hokage-sama,” she says, bowing slightly, “if I may?”

He’s sad, staring after her tragically lost youth and she’s angry because this shouldn’t have to be a conversation. She shouldn’t be the only one on the side of caution. The tall doors to his office close quietly behind her and Sakura stands in the hallway, furious and aimless, hands clenching and loosening rhythmically as she considers and reconsiders her stance. The ANBU on either side of the doors face forward but she can feel their eyes on her. Tortoise and Horse today, both playful and hardly ever serious.

In a small voice, she says to Horse, “He’s wrong,” she whispers because they helped raise her and train her and any words she has with them will stay with them. “He’s hokage and he’s _wrong_.”

Horse gives Sakura the smallest shrug she’s ever seen, even in ANBU, because Sakura’s right. He _is_ the hokage and his decisions are final and there’s nothing Sakura can do. Maybe she can work around them, but she can’t _defy_ them. Letting out a hard sigh, Sakura turns away. Tortoise’s hand reaches out and brushes her hair. She clenches her fists and nods slowly. The hand retreats. _Thank you_ , she thinks. Tortoise’s build is particularly solid, broad and muscular, and Sakura has always found their training to be the most soothing, their comfort the most effective. Directionless, Sakura considers her new teacher.

Hatake Kakashi is notorious for being irresponsibly late to everything ever and the meeting with the hokage took less time than Sakura hoped, so now she has free time. Sakura sighs and rubs her upper arms. It’s more than likely he’s at the graveyard, feeling guilty and looking tragically pathetic, and Sakura wants nothing to do with his self pity or his poor social skills or his mismatched disaster team. She buries her face in her hands and then turns toward the stairs, taking them with forced calm that strains her muscles until she passes through the doors and into the open air. Here she is free to move as she pleases. The mountain is calling her so she takes off at a run.

The trees are temping, swaying merrily in the light breeze, and Sakura takes to the first branch she sees and relishes in the sudden floating feeling that happens at the apex of a jump just before gravity takes hold again. In that split second she doesn’t feel halfway to a thousand with a full millennia of secrets hiding under her skin. In that breath she is little more than a rambunctious child in a world where everything is made of light and clouds and nothing is soaked in blood, secrets nothing more than broken dishes and stolen goodies.

Kakashi _is_ in the graveyard as she suspected, looking just a little more pathetic than usual. Next to him flutters the source of his misery, looking put out and furious and considerably shorter and younger than he himself is. Kakashi can’t see her, but she can see Sakura seeing her. The young lady turns away from the hopeless jounin. Sakura comes to a full stop on her branch and lets the young woman catch up, watches her float up to the branch and begin whatever rant she was cursing out the despondent man with.

“I’m _dead_ ,” she begins, “and he’s _not_!”

To anyone else it might sound accusatory, but Sakura can guess where the anger comes from.

“Why can’t he get that through his thick, ridiculous, self-pitying head? He isn’t dead! He’s alive, _supposedly_ , and he should be doing something other than wasting his youth! He’s practically an old man now! Hardly even fit for my company!” The ghost’s hands are in the air and she paces in the open space next to the branch that Sakura waits on, quietly amused, because this woman must have been something when she was alive.

“You,” the ghost says suddenly, thrusting a finger in Sakura’s face, “make him get a life.”

Sakura stares at the finger and then up into the determined, angry, _worried_ face of the girl who clearly cares far more for the flaky jounin than Sakura thinks he really deserves. It’s hard to deny the dead. There’s so little that they can do when it comes to whomever or whatever they leave behind, and as often as one might expect they have a thing or two to say about the state of their affairs.

Sakura hesitates. The girl has no way of knowing that Sakura is in a prime position to try and do something about the hopelessly despondent man stuck in the past, and it would be easy enough to lie and pretend that she and Kakashi have and would never have anything to do with each other. “I’m on his team,” she says finally, cursing herself quietly. “He’s the teacher for team 7 this year.”

The girl’s face goes blank in surprise then she turns to stare at his slouched form and the rage subsides into soft understanding and Sakura, more sure than before, thinks Kakashi really doesn’t deserve whoever this is.

“Oh,” the ghost whispers, “oh I didn’t know. That poor thing. His last team…”

Sakura listens, heart aching underneath its hard shell, her jaw set, her eyes dry, and sighs when the ghost finishes. Sakura curses herself and says, “I’ll do my best, Rin.”

The girl smiles. “Thank you, Sakura-chan.”

Kakashi turns as if to go, thinks about it, then turns back to the grave and reaches out to trace the engraved names of his last team with a trembling hand. Sakura thinks that’s enough of that and drops out of the tree. She gets right up behind him before he senses her and swings around, fingers reaching for the kunai pouch that isn’t strapped to his thighs, and he stares at her. Sakura puts her hands on her hips and frowns up at him.

“Don’t you have a _team_ to be meeting right about…” she trails off and glances at the sun. “ _Now_?”

“Ah…” Kakashi knows who she is, of course. Everybody in ANBU, active and retired, knows about the girl who knows everything. Just how close she actually is to knowing everything, well, nobody but Sakura knows the whole of it. “Sakura-chan! You see, I got lost and found myself here mysteriously…”

Sakura crosses her arms. “She’d hate it, you know,” she tells him, voice clipped. “That you waste your time here. You’ve got other things to do, so get on with them she’d probably say.”

Kakashi’s smile freezes. His eye, flinty, slides to the side. “Ah… that _does_ sound like Rin.”

Sakura doesn’t mind doing deeds for the dead. She likes running their errands, putting their souls to rest, easing their heartaches, but this man will be her teacher and she’ll have to see him again after this little encounter. The others, well she could just leave gifts or notes or vanish to never be seen again. Kakashi is different, a new constant in her life, and Sakura finds she hates it. It makes her teeth ache as she clenches her jaw.

“Well then, since Rin wishes it, what do you say we find the rest of your team?” Kakashi asks.

He turns away before Sakura can really respond and she finds her hands clenched so tightly that her knuckles crack when she loosens them forcibly, following her teacher dutifully. _They’re your team too_ , she can’t help but think sullenly. The obvious attempt to distance himself sets off her warning bells. It’s a bad team. Sakura knows it in her bones, knows that everyone else knows it too. A damaged sensei, two loose cannons, and her, the girl who can’t bring herself to trust anybody who isn’t already dead.

It’s a hard thing to admit, that you’ve lost faith in people.

Their walk is short, silent, but surprisingly relaxed despite the obvious offense taken at her interruption of his own personal self-torture and the mention of the number two hot button issue. Number one is a mystery even to her, and not because she doesn’t know what it is. Sakura knows but it doesn’t make any sense.

It’s about a ghost who isn’t a ghost.

The walk is quiet, quick, and oddly tense. Sakura keeps her hands loose by her sides and takes special care to keep her steps just half a step behind Kakashi’s, upsetting the smooth rhythm of her normal stride to put on the air of deference. Kakashi is, after all, an older man, a jounin, _her jounin sensei_. To anyone else, this would earn genuine respect. Or at least the appearance of respect, but Kakashi’s hands never leave his pockets and he never turns his head to look at her. Sakura has stepped carefully into his blind spot and stays there as they weave through the aimless crowds. Beneath the freedom of the wide branches and sloping rooftops, the walk seems much longer.

The stairs up the tower twist slowly, forcing Sakura to change her pace in order to remain inside Kakashi’s blind spot. Instead of being seen, she quickens her steps. Their skin threatens to brush, their bodies close enough that she can feel the warmth from his exposed wrist and she nearly doubles over when the revulsion hits her. Human contact seems so alien, so terribly _solid_ , that she reserves it for certain people. Ino, for example, is her only tether to the physical realm, the only one she wants, perhaps not the only one she needs but Sakura has no time to second guess her coping mechanisms. When Kakashi stops abruptly, Sakura nearly bumps into him. Her eyes flick to his head then to the door.

Wedged between the door and the wall, likely in an attempt to humiliate their very own brand new sensei (for lateness or for fun respectively), is an absolutely filthy eraser. Placed there, no doubt, by one of the two boys inside. Possibly both, but Sakura has her doubts. When she glances at Kakashi she catches him staring at the eraser with an unreadable expression, one that gives no indication of what he’s thinking. He hooks his fingers into the depression in the door and slides it open, making no move to avoid the trap. If he isn’t going to say anything then neither is she.

Sakura watches it fall, lips pressed shut, wondering if reality has altered around her to allow the eraser to fall in slow motion or if it simply seems that way to her. Beyond the falling object are her teammates, both intent on the scene playing out. Naruto’s expression is one of disbelieving joy; Sasuke’s is nearly inscrutable, bordering on open aggression. Pranks are good for the soul, apparently, or humor, or laughter, something like that. She can’t quite remember how the saying goes but she thinks that Sasuke could use some more of that in his life, soul, joy, laughs, whatever. Anything to loosen the constant tension in his shoulders and jaw.

Kakashi’s face sometimes manages to convey a well versed essay of emotion and depth, despite appearing terribly bland and having few distinguishing features. Sakura edges forward to see it now, staying carefully out of sight. What she catches are terrifically unimpressed hard lines, a completely new crease under his only visible eye that speaks of a bone-deep weariness with the state of his fellow man and Sakura is sure that, were it not already entirely gray, a patch of his hair would be losing color rapidly before their very eyes. When he speaks his voice somehow conjures the essence of the coldest winter Sakura can remember.

“My first impression of you guys is I don’t like you. My name is Hatake Kakashi and starting today, I’m your new jounin sensei.” 

Attention safely diverted from herself and her small body hidden by Kakashi’s own broad shoulders and baggy sweater, Sakura puts her hands over her face for a moment and breathes in once through her nose in an attempt to collect her thoughts. It has been a trying day. When she uncovers her face Kakashi has shifted his weight and begun to survey his new students. The chalk eraser lays unattended at his feet in a pile of fine white dust. With each moment that passes while Kakashi, quite pointedly, ignores the eraser, the tension in the two boys seems to grow exponentially. Sakura can almost see their anxiety, the moment of playfulness gone. Sasuke catches sight of her and sneers. It isn’t personal. It isn’t even particularly intentional, just a knee-jerk reaction to recognizing another person and making contact with another human being.

Naruto, glad for the sudden shift of attention, waves at her and grins. He is only recently aware of the fire that burns in his belly and digs its claws in when he finds himself in the middle of nightmares at night. “Sakura-chan!” he crows, “You made it!”

_Of course I did_ , Sakura responds silently. It sounds snotty, even to her.

Sasuke scoffs and looks away, his face half-hidden behind his laced fingers. Sakura wonders how he would feel if he knew that Sakura had, only half an hour earlier, advocated openly for his rights to be stripped with his clan name and his chakra. Had advocated for him to be drained and sealed like a common traitor. Had wished him the dull, diminished life of a bitter grocer or street peddler. If her thoughts are visible, neither Sasuke nor Naruto give any indication.

_Not a great start_ , she sighs. _Not a great team either_. _Not the worst, not yet_ , she thinks as the dossier for the previous Team 7 flashes through her mind. _It can’t be the worst_.

Kakashi catches her thoughtful expression and flashes her a curious look, one that Sakura returns with a bland smile and a series of vacant blinks. It only makes Kakashi look harder at her. Sakura has to force her hands to stay smooth at her sides, to keep still and not fidget, to loosen her jaw and not clench her teeth.

She wants nothing more than to tear out his curious, watchful eye.

Introductions don’t go much better.

Kakashi, caught and guilted into being a real sensei, takes them halfway up to the hokage mountain and settles them in for a friendly round of get-to-know your team and don’t-learn-anything-about-your-sensei. Unfortunately for his attempt at mysterious aloofness, Sakura already knows far more about him than she ever really wanted to.

“Okay guys, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourselves?” Kakashi begins. “Your dreams, ambitions, hobbies, that sort of thing,” he waves his hand in a lazy circle as a sort of physical _et cetra_. The introductions are a formality and a half-assed formality at that.

Predictably, Naruto goes first.

“I’m Uzumaki Naruto! I’m gonna be hokage!” he declares, reaching up to grasp his hitai-ate with both hands as he leans forward and shoots a look at Kakashi that makes Sakura’s stomach squirm.

It’s the kind of determination that gets people killed. The kind that makes legends. Sakura catches Kakashi’s expression. Blank surprise gives way to an absent smile and the pleasant variety of surprise. Beneath which is an uncomfortable intensity. He turns to look at Sasuke, seated grumpily between Naruto and Sakura.

The boy, always dramatic and overbearing, refuses to speak up and the silence stretches uncomfortably while Sakura waits for him to follow Naruto’s bold declaration. When he doesn’t, she sighs.

“Haruno Sakura,” she says, straightening a little and tucking her legs under herself more firmly. “I’m from a civilian family, but I want to serve this village. I want to protect its people.”

_I want to keep them people and not ghosts_.

Kakashi eyes her again, eye hard and horrifically perceptive. Sakura’s hands twitch.

Naruto whistles. “So cool, Sakura-chan…” he mumbles.

Sasuke speaks up then, but only to introduce himself and not to comment on Sakura’s, admittedly underwhelming statement. “Uchiha Sasuke. I don’t have dreams or anything like that, but I do have an ambition. There’s a certain man…” his fingers tighten until his knuckles turn white and his stare, cool and focused takes a hard turn for obsessive. “That I have to kill.”

Closing her eyes again, Sakura looks up and thinks bad thoughts about the leader of her village. _See? Loose cannon, hokage-sama. What did I tell you?_

In the hokage tower, at the exact moment of her crisis, the hokage sneezes and thinks wearily of his new team of possible liabilities and loose cannons and wonders if maybe Sakura was right. It wouldn’t be the first time. When he lifts his cup to his lips, it cracks.

_It’ll all work out_ , he tells himself and stares absently out the window with a worried twist to his lips. _It’ll work out just fine_.


	3. Demons, Monsters, and Men

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before her looms a demon. A god. A force of nature and chaos made flesh and blood. UPDATED!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The locations of some circumstances have been altered a little.

It does not, in fact, all work out just fine in the end. It does, actually, go horrifically sideways in the most painfully mundane ways possible. Each disaster another obvious precursor to the inevitable destruction of the team.

Naruto and Sasuke refuse to work together unless their lives are literally on the line, something they never even considered a possibility until the first time it comes up during a rare afternoon of actual training. They’re wobbly, exhausted, balancing on thin tree branches fifteen feet above a fast river current. Naruto’s chakra slips first and Sasuke’s hand snakes out instinctively. It catches Naruto’s forearm and struggles to hold on, shaking so violently it threatns to tear Sasuke from his own perch, even as his fingers behind to slip and his chakra starts to fail.

Sakura had already bailed for the afternoon and found some dusty scrolls to occupy her time in the library, and Kakashi had stepped out for a quick bite, and the boys know that if they fall the river will sweep them away. Sakura only hears about it from Ino who hears about it from Shikamaru and Kiba who happened along in time to fetch the exhausted genin from the river before they were dragged into the depths of an early watery grave. This is followed by hours upon hours of D-rank assignments, the most embarrassing that Sakura has ever experienced. So embarrassing that not even the ghosts can top her experiences with stories going back ten years.

After this incident, Sakura visits the hokage three more times and demands the immediate dissolution of the team and the termination of the active status of all three men. The hokage waves away her concerns each time. Mumbles platitudes and promises good missions. These promises, inevitably, fall through or are broken outright.

While some part of her recognizes that the rivalry between the two boys is—or could be—a healthy sort of friendship, as healthy as either of them might ever manage, it still serves as a clear red flag with clear indications of blowing up in their faces given their histories. Sakura is, apparently, the only individual in the whole village concerned about this possibility.

It doesn’t linger in her thoughts long though, the mystery of Kakashi’s horror story from childhood both far more interesting and decidedly more disturbing. A ghost who isn’t a ghost. Sakura has never heard of a ghost under several hundred years fading away, or of traveling far enough away from either their home or the site of their death that they would be impossible to track down. Yet, Kakashi’s ghost has either done that amount of traveling, or has faded entirely in under fifty years.

Or, more puzzling, he isn’t a ghost at all. The obvious implication being that he remains a living person. But why a living person with such a strong connection to someone would vanish so thoroughly manages to elude Sakura well into her evenings, the basics of meaningful human relationships continuing to fall short of her understanding despite her efforts to find appropriate reading material. It might be easier to simply ask Kakashi about his ghost but… Sakura would rather avoid getting to know the many any better than she already does. The knowledge that her simply knowing an unfortunate amount of supplemental facts does not in any way replace actually getting to know someone is a knowledge she feels comfortable ignoring.

Without a clear picture of what this means, if it really means anything at all, Sakura is loathe to take it to the hokage or Kakashi. Instead it sits in her stomach like a sour stone. It hardens there as she mucks her way through grueling manual labor and piss poor team dynamics.

It’s Naruto, eventually and to the surprise of exactly no one, who finally convinces the hokage that their team deserves something other than abuse from villagers or days spent ass deep in mud rewarded only by sore muscles and chewed out ears. The boy demands, in that ingeniously endearing way of his that makes Sakura nervous, a harder mission. The hokage takes an agonizingly slow drag from his pipe then pulls it from his mouth and upends it to dump the ash, rapping it against the tray sharply so it echoes in the empty room and catches their wandering attention. Sakura’s hands, hidden only because she had the forethought to stand behind her teammates, shake.

How many days did she visit the old man in his crumbling tower, asking, pleading, _begging_ , for something, _anything_ , else? How many plausible explanations did she concoct? How many hours did she spend thinking through her strategies, through her reasoning, finding holes in her theories and stitching them shut? Now, through one impassioned speech formed only in the heat of the moment, Naruto is getting everything she worked so hard for. Sakura smooths her skirt to hide the way her hands shudder with the urge to wring his neck. Kakashi, infuriatingly on her left, catches the motion. Sakura refuses to look up at him while he stares down impassively at her, so damn curious that her jaw aches from clenching her teeth.

“Well, then,” the hokage murmurs, smiling crookedly at his charge. “How could I say no to such a display?”

Sakura’s knees lock together and her spine nearly cracks when it stiffens too suddenly and she continues to smooth her skirt, cursing softly in her mind to block out the jeering sound of her sister’s amusement. She knows, without even a quiver of doubt, that such a display wouldn’t have gotten her what she wanted. It would’ve, likely, ended exactly the opposite. It would’ve sounded too much like a threat, like a security risk. Like a death sentence.

Still, even Sasuke looks pleased. The back of his head is crimped unpleasantly, not quite recovered from the last _Incident_. There are many _Incidents_. They are a long string of unfortunate situations and circumstances that none of them, not even Kakashi, will ever repeat even under the most agonizing or clever duress.

The hokage waves his hand absently and they’re dismissed.

“Ah, Sakura-chan, if you could stay?” he calls when they turn to leave.

Effectively, he spoils perhaps the only perfectly coordinated movement they have ever performed as a team. Each turning flawlessly on their heels to head, together, for the door. Likely, none of them have noticed the small miracle. Sakura’s jaw clicks when she yanks it to the side to loosen it and the hokage calls for Kakashi to stay too. Sakura turns, Kakashi thrusts his hip out, Naruto and Sasuke continue unhindered to the door and the suddenly free afternoon that awaits them anxiously just beyond the tower’s entrance. Their backs disappear from Sakura’s peripheral. Carefully, she twists her jaw the other way and produces another single crack. Kakashi joins her as she steps back to the hokage. Behind her Naruto and Sasuke’s movements are subconsciously coordinated in a way that the movements of the larger group are not and Sakura, as much as she tries to reason it away and calm her raging heart, hates them for it. Just a little, deep down.

The hokage pinches another dab of tobacco into his pipe and lights it with a stray match, sucking down a few puffs before speaking. “Please, sit,” he motions at the untouched chairs.

Neither Sakura nor Kakashi so much as twitch.

The hokage sighs a cloud of white. “I would like for you to meet our client, before you depart,” he finally explains, settling back comfortably in the heavy swaths of cloth that make up his robe. It pillows around him, larger now in his old age than it was the first time he wore it.

Sakura wishes he would get a new one, or get the old one tailored. It makes him look small. Weak. It makes just how frail he really is stand out, makes his wrists unbearably thin, his shoulders hunched, his spine curled. They wait while the old man reaches a gnarled, thin hand out and carefully sets a small kettle to boil on the tiny burner set up next to his desk. It has always looked like a fire hazard to Sakura. They wait for him while he stirs tea and places three cups down in the middle of the desk, a neutral zone that clamors like a peace offering.

“Sit, please,” he says again and this time they obey.

The official office of the hokage is different than the one he takes personal meetings in. The chairs are formal and uncomfortable compared to the lush cushions Sakura is used to and the desk between her and him is vast and vaguely intimidating. The hokage sucks his pipe and they wait still.

“This mission may likely turn out to be far above a C-rank,” the hokage announces.

Sakura nods. Given the current political situation in Wave, it’s hardly surprising. She can feel Kakashi’s eye on her but she doesn’t speak or look at him.

“The two of you are the best chance we have of completing this mission and, also,” he pauses to take a drag from his pipe, “to look for an opportunity to stabilize Wave. It could be a powerful alliance, if the troubles there are settled. Your client is a bridge builder who’s work has been interfered with by a local crime boss who hopes to remain in power by impovrishing the island. This bridge, if completed, would alter entirely the power structure of the trade systems.” The hokage looks up at them from under the wide brim of his hat. “It _must_ be completed.”

Sakura tries to remember everything she knows about the country. It’s wet, obviously, covered on all sides by an ocean which the construction of a bridge to increase trade flow essential to its survival. The dispute is with the largest local warlord, Gato. Sakura tries to hold down the revulsion she feels. Warlord doesn’t describe the man. He’s more like a mob boss, or a gangster, a greasy slug intent on keeping the trade flow under his command and the people destitute in order to maintain his authority. After the murder of the mizukage, the country remains prey to men like Gato.

The hokage sighs.

“If we dispatch Gato and assist in the completion of the bridge, that would be enough, right?” Sakura asks before Kakashi can.

He knows of her but he doesn’t _know_ her. Her real abilities are little more than mystery him, a status he has allowed to continue despite their team status. He, by all accounts, seems more than content to ignore any progress she might make under him beyond the basics she is already familiar with. The sudden reminder of his negligence rubs at her again as she waits for the hokage’s response.

Kakashi is reevaluating her, she can feel it in his heavy gaze. Beneath the desk, her hands clench.

The hokage nods, smoking freely. “It might be a start. There may be other assistance required afterwards but the bridge will create a real opportunity for the people of Wave to get back on their feet.”

Sakura and Kakashi nod agreeably, heads ducking in unison. They’re dismissed.

They don’t speak as they leave the tower and Sakura heads home before Kakashi can initiate anything. She’s tired, she doesn’t need his down talk.

The mission isn’t till tomorrow and she could use a bath.

It’s still dark out when she wakes. The birds are quiet. The village is overcast, shadows thick around the streetlights, and Sakura lays in bed hoping that sleep will come back to her until the birds begin their first weary chirps. Then she rubs her eyes with the heels of her palms and sighs. Regardless of her desires, the day has begun. Twisting her shoulders, she turns. The floorboards are cold beneath her bare heel and calve, the first sign that the weather is turning, and she sighs hard through her teeth. Exhaustion riddles her thin frame and leaves her numb and heavy. Still, she pushes up from the mattress.

When she first started hearing ghosts all those years ago, she had started to sleep under her bed and nothing her parents threatened or tried to bargain with could sway her. Finally her father had taken the frame and let her sleep on the floor in peace. Now gravity works against her as she struggles to rise.

The day’s early monotony weighs on her as she yawns, stretches, stumbles through her door and down the hall into the dark bathroom. Without turning on the light she brushes her teeth, rinses, spits. Then she pads down to the kitchen and turns the stove on, measures some rice, dumps it in a pot, measures some water. Sakura sets it over the open flame and covers it. Then she fills the kettle and leaves it on a cool burner for her father. Up the stairs, back to the bathroom, a cold shower, a quick scrub, then to her closet where she stands for less than five minutes digging out a fresh pair of leggings and a pale dress. White, fashioned high on the throat, slit down each side at her hips. Sakura stares at herself in the dim morning light. There are heavy bags beneath her eyes, hollows in her jaw, in her cheeks, in the crook of her nose and where her collar bones meet.

She fills the tap, washes her face, stares through her reflection. She is only twelve. Dries her hands. Dries her neck, her chin, her nose, her forehead. Holds the dampening cloth against her skin and hopes some of her melancholy will leech into it so she can wash it away. Inside her head, her sister is languished like a sunned cat.

Life is a series of facts that morning while her head is dulled from the distant roar of the wails that chased her into her dreamless sleep. Bag packed the night before. Pack a lunch. Thermos left out for tea.

Sakura doesn’t break her plodding stride as she reaches down and retrives her pack, slinging it over her shoulder and slipping quietly out the door in a single motion. The key above the mantel exceeds her reach. Sakura balances on the unsteady statue her father procured the month before in a deal to grab it and lock the door behind her. Then she hops up, puts the key back, and slips back to the cobbled path.

Predictably, she’s the first at the gate.

Predictably, Kakashi is the last.

He ambles over with his hands stuffed loosely in his pockets, only an hour late instead of three, breaking neither stride nor his air mood as he bypasses Naruto’s outrage and Tazuna’s open expression of his doubts about their capabilities. Sakura silently echoes the bridge builder and swallows from her thermos. Kakashi smiles at them over Naruto’s voice and the cold distaste of Sasuke’s general air, sidesteps their client and resettles his pack on his shoulders by shrugging.

“Well then,” he says pleasantly as she steps out the gate and turns back to them. “Shall we?”

_He could take it just a little seriously_ , Sakura thinks with disapproval low in her belly. She’s right, of course.

It’s days before it really sinks in. Then they’re accosted by a true monster. A living legend in the flesh, the likes of which Sakura has only ever met wisps and echoes of. With the sudden threat of death looming over them, it sinks in. Kakashi really is ready to take out his own self pity on them, if only to soothe is own aches.

It isn’t all bad though.

She feels humbled. Before her looms a demon. A god. A force of nature and chaos made flesh and blood. He howls before her, chakra and rage and sheer, unyielding will forcing him to take up arms and fight. Even if he had thought to lay down his weapons, the pride of his unbroken spine would never allow it. She trembles, feels sweat drip down her jaw, her neck, her legs. With a single sweeping motion he could end her life, blow them all away, sever her limbs, set fire to her nerves.

Nothing is humbling like being reminded of your own mortality.

The boy in the tree hovers, curious, waiting. Sakura glances up at him, then around her, but it seems that she’s the only one to notice he’s there and she finds herself content to allow him his secrets. Before her is battle. Behind her Tazuna chokes on his own terror, a terror that she does not share. The only thing choking in her throat is adrenaline. Their opponent is a demon, perhaps even in the truest sense that anyone could hope to be, but the souls of her team and charge are fixed firmly within their bodies. There will be no deaths here, so she waits.

So she lets herself relish in how small she feels. There’s no tension or fear, just a sudden shots of bliss as the viciousness of the Demon of the Mist’s spirit battles against her own, their hearts clashing and cut from the same cloth. They’re evenly matched in wills alone, she knows. This is not the kind of battle that consumes her teammates, but another that tears at her very soul. Perhaps he could have killed her, torn her down without a second thought, but instead he glances sideways at her and tilts his head curiously. They’re similar. Maybe even the same. Kindred.

Sakura blinks docilely at him and smiles, her heart hammering in her chest as her soul’s cry for acknowledgement is heard. In the moment of distraction, the boy moves. Senbon riddle the demon’s body and he stiffens. Time stands still.

She frowns at the pattern of the needles. Something is off. Feels wrong.

“A hunter nin,” Kakashi murmurs, staring at the boy.

Pale, dark haired, masked, he looks the part it’s true but Sakura isn’t looking at him. She’s focusing hard on the senbon and why they look wrong. Hunts kill. They don’t paralyze. Sakura studies the boy’s simple mask. Kakashi lets him take Zabuza.

There is no ghost.

Sakura rubs her arms. Behind her Tazuna sways, still thick in the throes of his own fear. Kakashi comes to stand near, placating their charge until he’s reasonably under control and drinking steadily in the hopes that the drink might make him forget the fear. Kakashi half turns to Sakura.

“Well?”

It’s an obvious challenge Sakura bristles.

“The pattern of the senbon indicate that Zabuza was paralyzed, an attempt to make him look dead so the false hunter could extract him,” Sakura reports softly, eyes burning. _I’m not just a walking medium. I’m a shinobi too._

Kakashi knows not to ask about a ghost. Instead he nods shortly and said, “I thought so too. Good work.”

The praise feels like a cheese grater across her chest. Sakura ignores him and throws out her senses in an attempt to locate either Zabuza or the boy who had taken him but finds neither. It isn’t unexpected. Sakura shakes her head again, for Kakashi’s benefit, and frowns. The bridge is nearby, but rather than the promise of safety Konoha’s walls would bring, the city will bring nothing but more danger. Sakura shifts her weight on the balls of her feet.

The ghosts are thicker now, throngs of them milling aimlessly, staring at her with empty eyes that hold as much curiosity as they can muster, many of them barely human. They are quieter than the ghosts in Konoha. Hardy able to whisper, though some of them speak softly, and their voices raise together in a chirping cacophony of misery when they had realize Sakura can hear them. It continues now, their hands reaching out for her. Few of them can materialize enough to actually make contact. Still, she can feel them pass through her skin, hundreds of ghostly hands reaching inside her with the intent on pulling a little of her back out, and it makes her nervous. Makes her skin itch as if a thousand ants are pinching her.

These ghosts are still young but are faded and distant, surrounded by nothing but death. Sakura has to wonder what the ghosts in the city are like.

She hopes they aren’t like this.

“Okay team,” Kakashi calls, eyeing Sakura with a flinty eye, “let’s move out. Our mission continues.”

They had expected this, she and Kakashi. It’s all going according to plan.

Sakura chews on a thumbnail to avoid shivering as she passes through the ghosts that surround the team and press in close to try and get to her. Her hands shake and her stomach quivers. They make her sick with their thoughtless need and grasping desire that wants nothing more than to suck her dry. It must show on her face because Kakashi looks at her a few times. He looks concerned. That, more than anything, makes Sakura furious and sick and she replaces Naruto as the guard for Tazuna to get away from his unduly gentle gaze before she turns on him and tries to tear that piercing gaze right out of his head.

“You have family, kiddo?” Tazuna asks her. He’s been drinking. His gait wavers, swaying heavily side to side with each step.

“Yes,” she tells him, “a mother and father.”

“And they let you get into this kind of work? Aren’t you too pretty?” _Aren’t you too young?_

It isn’t meant the way it comes out but it strikes her, a ham-fisted blow across the face.

Sakura smiles at him and says, “It wasn’t there decision. It was mine.” She understands. He’s a father, a grandfather even, a family man with great pride in his work and life. His reaction isn’t uncommon. Expected, even.

“Your decision, huh,” he says thoughtfully, glancing away from her to the distant shoreline.

_My decision_ , she thinks and struggles to hold back the acid in her thoughts. Her hands curl and uncurl. Her stomach twists in knots, churning unsteadily and pushing bile back up her throat.

The lingering memory of Zabuza’s chakra pushing against hers leaves her in too good a mood to feel angry about his thoughtlessness for long though, because for whatever this bridge builder might think she was measured against the weight of a demon and found worthy of notice. Inside her head, her sister coos and preens. Together they are, or the they will be, a force worthy of the eyes of the living and not just the dead.

The path ahead stretches forward in a sloping bend and Sakura lifts her head to taste the wind. She can smell the sea. They’re close.


	4. The Weight of History

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "In order to continue on you must be a greater asset than hinderance. It is your only choice.” UPDATED!

“Haruno Sakura, you are from this day forward, sworn to secrecy on the subject of your bloodline’s heritage,” the hokage says.

Sakura has never seen him so serious.

She is barely seven and a half, up to his shoulder, dressed in formal black as she is inducted into what appears to be a high powered social secret society of the rare and dangerous. Sakura is, apparently, the rarest and most dangerous of all things within Konoha. It had never really sunk in that someone who can hear the dead has access to a nearly unlimited pool of knowledge. At least she’s never really thought critically about the amount of things she soaks in from the ghosts she meets, the weight of the stories that she carries around in her head. The price of the history she contains.

Now though, dressed in all black and straight-backed before the hokage, before his guards, before clan leaders, before agents who don’t exist anymore, she takes a moment to wonder just what he means. What he really means. What her gift _really_ means.

“Yes, hokage-sama,” she tells him.

He sighs. “Sakura-chan, do you even understand _why_ you must be sworn to secrecy?”

Sakura is seven and doesn’t understand, not really, not yet. The little understanding she has comes in the form of a compound empty save for the rows upon rows of transparent faces. A body count attesting to the allure of power. “I’m not sure,” she says, still stuck between her first few burns from honesty and years of thinking it was the best policy under all circumstances. She shifts her weight. “I guess I know a lot of stuff,” she says, “stuff nobody else knows. Stuff I shouldn’t know.”

The crowd seems to grow closer, looming over her like colorless shadows with beards and expressionless faces. Sakura doesn’t look at them. She looks only at her hokage, at the hunched old man who slaughtered a clan with a few words, who could kill her with a single gesture.

“Secret stuff, like the Uchiha compound,” she says.

The collective gasps, ridiculously loud in the silence.

It’s a risk. Calculated, somewhat poorly, to test just how steady her rocky footing is. It’s the jackpot. The crowd is an uproar of muted whispers sliding around her ears and skin like snakes. The hokage’s eyes narrow.

“And what do you know about that?” he asks, voice soft, demure, genial even, and Sakura knows she’s treading on dangerous ground.

“They were planning a coop, so you killed them,” she tells him.

Truth is not always the best option. As Sakura grows up it becomes a last resort used only when manipulation and fact-retention can no longer carry water. Some secrets are worth more than gold. More than any number of lives. More than nations. Some secrets can kill, slaughter by the hundreds, and the right secrets can give a person virtual immortality. The right pressure, delicate leverage, and suddenly nothing matters. For the right secret, there are no longer any consequences.

Sakura is staring down a kind of immortality now, staring straight into the clear, focused eyes of her leader. She can see the wheels turning there. Her own eyes are flat, unyielding. All traces of the demure child are gone in that instant.

While the others may see only her tiny stature, the well-groomed gloss of her hair, the perfectly manicured nails, the soft pout of her lips, the possibility of her life stretching before her as a woman, the hokage sees the steel lining her frame.

He turns and says, “Everyone out now. I must speak with the young lady in private.”

There’s no urgency in his tone but his eyes are sharp. Sakura’s played her cards correctly. She waits quietly as the room slowly empties, black robed officials and elders making dignified retreats and masked ANBU members slipping into the shadows. None of them are really gone. The elders will have their ears pressed against the door and the ANBU are the hokage’s personal guard.

“You broke into the compound?” the hokage asks.

Sakura, who has never broken any rules ever in her entire life, bristles at the insinuation. Except for the child who slips in and out of those empty halls, the one nobody ever bothers and Sakura can only vaguely remember, the compound is closed off. It requires special seals to get in. It always has. Invitations are a must, but Sakura has been invited in more than once while the last living owner is busy elsewhere ignoring the ghosts he can feel but not see. Nobody else goes in or out. Once, the year before, three students snuck in. Sakura hasn’t seen them since.

“Of course not!” she snaps. Her hands fly up to her mouth and her eyes go wide. It’s bad manners to yell at old people, her mother always says, single most powerful old person in the entire village with her life in his hands or not.

The hokage’s brow rises as a single white patch and he shortles. Sakura’s face flushes.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers through her hands, “I didn’t mean to yell.”

The hokage’s hand descends and Sakura goes very stiff for a moment but he simply ruffles her hair and winks at her. “Sakura-chan, do you know the history of your clan?” he asks.

She does. She has spent a great deal of time and effort rooting out every available piece of information, memorizing it, connecting the vague family lines, tracing her lineage as far back as it will go. “Of course! I know it all the way back to Haruno Ryouske, the founder!” It’s perhaps her most impressive accomplishment in her short seven years. The Haruno clan is over seven-hundred years old, although it has only existed within Fire for about five-hundred or so.

The hokage laughs. “You know all that? How very impressive!”

It is. Sakura cannot resist the desire to grin up at him because she is still a child and she knows how impressive it is, that is, after all, why she learned it all. “My clan came from over the sea, from a country that nobody knows anything about except that it was at war when my clan fled. We used to be powerful shinobi but now we’re merchants. Ryouske was the most powerful so she became clan head, and she had a mysterious ability which made her so powerful but…”

“But?” the hokage asks, tilting his head.

“But none of our records say what that ability was so I don’t know,” she mutters. It’s never been a source of great frustration for her because she knows what that ability is, though really she can’t say for sure she knows its extent. Her brow wrinkles and her lips twist together. It’s her thinking face, one the hokage recognizes only because she hardly ever wears any other kind.

His voice is gentle. Everything about him is always so gentle and it makes Sakura nervous because he’s _hokage_ and that means that he’s the most powerful person in the village, which means that he’s intentionally very gentle. He could, at any moment, not be so gentle. Some of the ghosts have seen him in action and they tell tales that make her blood run cold, others remember other hokages, there is one who _was_ a hokage but he hardly ever speaks and it is never to Sakura.

“But you have an idea of what that ability was,” the hokage says in that soft voice and it is not a question.

Sakura nods. “Of course,” she mumbles. Of course she does, how could she not? Nobody else can see ghosts like she can, nobody else can hear them whispering at all hours, and nobody believed her when she first tried to tell people. Now she keeps quiet and spends more time listening than speaking. “I think she could do what I do.”

The hokage nods, a gentle bob of his head. “There have been three people with this ability in your clan, Sakura-chan, and you are the third. The first was Ryouske, who lived long before this village existed. The second lived during the village’s early years, Haruno Minori, who served this village as an intelligence agent and was unparalleled all across this continent. She helped bring an end to the war when no others could. She knew a great many things about this village’s enemies, but she also knew a great many things about this village as well. Things that were dangerous to its survival.”

Sakura swallows. She’s guessed as much, but it’s different to hear it straight from the hokage’s mouth. Her fingers twitch and she licks her lips. People knowing that she knows things makes her nervous.

“The work that Minori did was invaluable. This village would not have survived without her and for all the danger she posed, the value was much greater. You pose a danger to this village, Sakura-chan. In order to continue on you must be a greater asset than hinderance. It is your only choice.”

A shiver runs up Sakura’s spine and her hands clench as a tiny prickle of sweat forms on the back of her neck. It’s fear, she realizes distantly. The hokage’s stare is hard and unwavering and Sakura wills herself to meet it. This is the path she has chosen. This is the future she has decided upon. When she refuses to back down and her teeth grit and her knuckles turn white and she returns the heavy stare of a man who could kill her with a flick of a finger, she sees a tiny sliver of approval glimmer deep in his eyes. Like a passing storm, his eyes clear. Some kind of test has transpired and Sakura has passed it. The trembling doesn’t stop though. Bravado isn’t her strong suit, not really, and few have enough of it to withstand the hokage’s full attention.

“I _will_ be an asset to this village,” Sakura whispers fiercely, choking on terror. “I _will_ protect its people.”

The hokage’s eyes are flinty, gleaming with a light does not yet recognize as her country’s will, as _her_ will, and he nods. “I thought as much. Very well, then you must begin this journey you have chosen. It will be long and difficult, but you are strong and brave.” He smiles at her, full of warmth and solidity and confidence, and Sakura feels her heart thunder in her ears. “I believe in you,” he says.

It is the first time anyone has ever said those words to her. Sakura’s hearing bleeds out for a moment. The path is clear. There is nowhere else to go but forward, no other roads to take. Sakura’s hands clench again. “Thank you,” she whispers.

“Hmm,” the hokage grins and nods again. “You are strong, but you must be stronger. If you wish to protect this village you must first protect yourself, and to do that you will need trainers, teachers, and perhaps a bit of luck.”

Sakura’s stomach twists and her heart beats loudly in her chest but she lifts her head and says, “Yes, hokage-sama.”

The hokage flicks his fingers suddenly in a precise, singular motion that sends a soft brush of air rushing past either side of her face. Sakura does her best not to flinch. If he had wanted her dead, she would already be dead and there would have been no need to go through all the ridiculous formality just for a private execution. Suddenly she becomes aware that she is not alone in facing the hokage. On either side of her are masked, faceless people. ANBU, she recognizes dimly. The roaring of panic in her head makes her limbs heavy, wooden, and her senses numb.

This is the first time she meets Horse and Tortoise. They are her first trainers, each immeasurably playful in their own ways and stronger than Sakura thinks any regular pair of people ought to be. Tortoise (she calls him Toto) is soft spoken and slow moving. It is a lie. She’s slow until she’s not and, by that time, you’re dead (or in Sakura’s case she’s lost the spar). Horse is quick witted with a quicker mouth, cleverer than Sakura a few times over. It frustrates the girl, drives her mad, until she outsmarts him once. Then, on equal footing, they begin a new game. As their training progresses, more mental than outright physical, she, Toto, and Horse all become both cat and mouse. Perhaps none of them are either, or they are all both.

All Sakura can say is that anything she learned about survival, she learned from them. From their tricks, their tips, their muted sadism. Sakura bears it until she feels she might collapse under the pressure and then she escapes to the library, or to the hokage’s private collection, training by herself, learning, soaking up the ghosts. She has been seeing them since before she could talk and still they bring her new things seven years later.

This is when she meets _him_ too. The son of the White Fang. Hatake Kakashi.

Every three days he sits in the graveyard for hours, tracing the same two names on the massive stone that sits in the center of the entire complex over and over. Sakura does not speak to him. She brings her ancestors flowers, fills their shrine with food for the deer that wander by and birds.

They speak only once, she and Kakashi. Toto mentions him off-hand and claims that his solo mission records are the best ANBU has seen in decades and that, should he deign to interact with her, she might learn something from him. They speak only once when he turns down a position as her trainer.

The ghosts tell her he is afraid of training anyone. Two teams dead and him still alive. What if something goes wrong? What if he gets her killed? What if he can’t protect her? Best solo records in decades because he’s too afraid to be part of a team.

Sakura wants forgive him, she could, and she tries, but she will fail for years. A ghost dogs his steps and pushes and prods him and tries to force him away from the monument every hour he stands there every three days, screaming at him until she tires herself out. It rubs Sakura wrong that Kakashi—that anyone—could be so oblivious. The woman is his teammate, she must be. How can he mourn her when it’s clear he never knew her that well?

They don’t speak again.

 

Sakura and the hokage speak again though. Many times. Nearly twice a week for years. There are so many ghosts drifting the streets, crying out with secrets that could bury the village, and Sakura must report every single one to weed out which ones she must never speak aloud. It is because of this rule that Sakura finds she is on equal footing with a man who could destroy her without a second thought. She could tear the whole village and everyone within it down. She knows everything about everyone. She could raze the whole countryside and the daiymo too, if she wanted, so she challenges him. Every time he makes a decision she finds poor, she challenges him, tests his limits, runs around the borders of her abilities and strikes when she thinks he’s weak.

_A hokage cannot be weak_ , she tells him over and over. _You must learn from the past. You must understand the mistakes of your predecessors_.

He laughs her off. Who is she to tell him so? She’s a child. She’s never sacrificed anything for anyone. She’s never killed. What does she know?

Sakura bites her tongue more often as she grows, keeps her lips sealed and her eyes peeled, soaking in as much as she can. She stops reporting to the hokage as often. She claims the ghosts have told her nearly everything they ever could, that they have run out of secrets, but it’s a lie. Sakura lies and lies and forces herself to remember. To keep a stiff lip and a straight back.

She will save this village, or she will see it burn.


	5. Fault Lines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakura’s head turns too slow to see what makes the sudden squelching sound. All she can hear are birds. UPDATED!

_Chapter 5: Fault Lines_

Things are quiet, for a while. Kakashi trains the team, teaches the boys, gives them goals, and keeps Sakura at arm’s length. They are dancing around each other. Sakura is the worst student he’s ever had and he is the worst teacher who’s ever tried to teach her.

If the boys notice, they don’t say anything.

“Sakura-chan,” Tsunami says one evening while the boys train, “you and your sensei seem at odds.” She sips her tea.

It’s genuinely curious, this soft interrogation, and Sakura remains slumped against the wall near the front door where she can watch her teammates. When she speaks, it’s with a low and disinterested voice. “Oh?” she asks, glancing at the woman with a half-hearted, mischievous smile. “Do we? I think we get on quite well.”

Tsunami frowns and Sakura finds herself startled into laughter by the lukewarm reaction.

The woman scoots closer. “Why are you two like this? He seems just fine with the boys.” She glances toward the raucous training, Kakashi’s low comments egging them on as they race up a badly bruised tree.

Their current endeavor is simple enough, the basic of the basic, and it should be posing little to no difficulty for the two of them. Or, for Sasuke at least. Yet they struggle, seething and resentful. Kakashi has failed to teach them how to analyze the flow of another’s chakra so his first demonstration is little more than a show, and without this base understanding of manipulating chakra to a specific point in the body, they fail to grasp the point of the exercise.

Sakura, whose training has been considerably more rigorous, can attest that this particular technique has saved her life more than once.

To Tsunami she says, “I’m sure we’ll work through it. All problems can be solved with communication, right?” It is not, in fact, something she believes and Tsunami doesn’t look like she’s buying it. It’s something Sakura heard Naruto say once.

It’s hard to believe that it actually seems to work for him. The brute strength of his ideals surprises her, although it really shouldn’t, and she watches him closely to see how far it will take him. It surprises her how much she wants him to succeed.

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” Tsunami asks, brushing her hair behind her ear.

Sakura shrugs. “Not really,” she replies.

Kakashi is _not_ fine with the boys.

He’s disinterested at best, decidedly negligent at worst. If the hokage hadn’t given him direct orders and a hopeless ultimatum, _train the team or leave the village_ , Sakura is as sure as she’s ever been that he would have refused the team and someone else equally as incompetent would be stuck with them. As it is, Kakashi never once looks up from his book while the boys work. Sakura skips training more often than not and wanders through the city with Tazuna instead of spending time with the ticking time bombs. She wonders which who will break first.

“But they’re your friends!” Tsunami insists.

Sakura looks at her headlong with a hard stare. “They’re my team,” she corrects automatically. It feels like academy days.

The woman frowns. “Shouldn’t you be friends with your team?” she asks softly.

Sakura looks away. “Yes,” she says.

Tsunami falls silent, worried about pushing the newly discovered soft spot in the girl’s armor. The conversation halts and is replaced by an easy silence, broken only by the rough voices of her teammates and the occasional humming of her sensei. Sakura, for the most part, is relieved. There are ghosts here, so many that she can’t get away from them no matter where she goes, and they demand most of her attention. She has little energy for anything else.

It feels like the Uchiha compound. Full to the brim but everywhere and in every direction, and she’s having trouble sleeping. The ghosts here cry out more often than the ones in Konoha, though their voices are softer. It’s been days but they’ve cried every night. All she can hear is the continuous, breathy sound of loss dogging her every waking moment. There is nothing Sakura can do for them. They’re fading, forgotten. Barely human. It hurts her to hear their voices, the ones who can still speak. They grate against her like dull iron on stone.

“Okay team,” Kakashi calls, snapping his book shut, “let’s take a break.”

The boys ignore the call for rest. Kakashi looks over at Sakura.

“Sakura-chan?” he asks.

Her fists ball so hard her joints creak but she stands and smiles at him. It feels plastic. She wonders what it looks like. “Sensei?” she asks in return.

“Feel like training today?”

“Ah,” she says, scuffing her shoe. “No thanks.”

“Ah,” he murmurs, turning away. “Okay.”

Sakura knows he doesn’t know what to think about her. Her reserves are unusual for someone her age, deeper and more concentrated than her peers—teammates excluded, of course—and her chakra is sharp. It cuts him when he rubs up against it. The Sakura she puts on for them is lazy. She doesn’t work, doesn’t train. Barely lifts a finger except to help Tsunami around the house, and even that is minimal.

She refuses to show her colors to him and, in some ways, it’s obvious.

Kakashi _knows_ she’s holding out.

The boys don’t, though, and she feels just the faintest slimmer of guilt when Naruto’s offers for training go refused and calls to socialization go unanswered. It makes her remember the old complex of apartments he lives in. The telephone poles infrequent, broken and gone unfixed, his windows still boarded up from when they were smashed in, the obvious lapse in his manners when he skirts around inviting his team home. It makes her feel worse. The glimmer a hard kernel in her chest, wedged between her ribs, grinding against them, and Sakura ignores it.

She feels sick, but she pushes through.

That night, Naruto sneaks away sometime after dinner to train in secret in a small clearing a ways away from the house and doesn’t come back till morning. Sasuke struggles in his sleep. Kakashi spends half the night up, perched on the roof, swinging his legs and humming a soft tune that Sakura doesn’t recognize. She leans against the inside of the door and listens.

The moon is dipping toward the horizon again when Sakura draws her knees up to her chest and rests her head against them, Kakashi’s low voice drowning out the sounds of the ghosts howling. The house has been cleansed so they can’t get in, a trick she learned unconsciously when she was younger, but their voices carry through the walls. They insulate around her, buffeting her from all sides. Kakashi’s voice washes them away, each low buzz an earthquake, a slow chant, a gift of sleep.

Someone covers in with a thin blanket sometime during the short period she sleeps buts she doesn’t know who. Naruto has made a friend before breakfast.

It’s been days. The bridge is nearly finished, the other end stretching toward the half in Wave and now in sight from land. A few more days and their mission will be finished. Kakashi catches Sakura’s arm after breakfast and requests a walk which she agrees to. They leave the others to train. Sakura ignores the odd looks that burn her back.

“Now that the bridge is nearly done, how goes our other project?” Kakashi asks, hands in his pockets. The book remains mercifully hidden.

Sakura doesn’t look at him, choosing instead to gaze out at the rush of water scrabbling at the short cliff they’ve found. “I’ve been searching the island and I think I know where Gato is.”

Kakashi’s eye burns her too. The island, for all that there are so many ghosts, isn’t in actuality very big at all and there are only so many ridiculously wealthy palaces when most of the population can’t feed itself. Even Naruto or Sasuke could have found him.

His head tilts toward her and he asks, “But not Zabuza?” _Or the boy?_

A sour expression threatens to creep over her features. She shakes it away. “No. Neither Zabuza nor the boy have been located. It’s like they vanished. Their control is impressive.” It comes out wistful, impressed, and she swallows the disgust at the mistake. Kakashi is an enemy she will not show weakness to.

“Hmm,” he says. It’s impossible that he’s missed her mistake. “The ghosts don’t know either?”

The walk had been peaceful, benign even, but it’s shattered in an instant. Sakura tucks her hands behind her back. Her jaw clenches. Kakashi is suddenly too close for comfort and it takes all she has to not bolt sideways and away from him. Sakura shakes her head wordlessly.

“Maybe they’re lying?”

Sakura’s head turns and she speaks before she knows what she’s doing. “It’s not as common as you’d think for ghosts to be malignant you know,” she says because she’s so damn clever and she just knows so damn much. It’s hard to stay quiet when you just want to be ahead of everyone else.

Kakashi’s head tilts toward her. She can see his eye over the bridge of his nose. Her stomach feels sick.

“Oh?” he asks. “Is it?”

“Yes,” she says and hates herself. “Mostly they’re glad somebody can hear them so they talk.”

“And they hold no allegiances?” he asks and Sakura hears the veins of real interest.

It’s what does her in. So few in the village know about her ability, know the actual honest whole of it, less know more than she’s willing to let on—which is very little—and the interest, the desire to _know_ rings in her chest. She’s still a child. She _wants_ to be understood even if only by this man. This awful sensei with too much baggage.

So Sakura talks. “It’s hard to care about much when you’re dead. It’s even harden when your village is what killed you. The dead like to talk. They never really stop talking, it gets—,”

She stops just in time.

Kakashi’s focus is wholly on her. She can feel it pushing against her skin, hot. Probing like little needles.

“It gets?” he prompts carefully.

Sakura’s chest compresses. She can’t breathe. Her lips feel numb and won’t move, her throat full of chalk, her skin damp, her heart thundering. She can’t tell him. She _can’t_. It will be an admission of weakness, of fault, of how small she still is.

Kakashi slows to a stop. Sakura keeps walking.

“It gets?” he repeats, his voice a kunai between her shoulder blades.

“Loud,” she whispers so softly that she can’t be sure he hears and he can’t be sure either. Sakura picks up her pace and leaves him by the tall tree with the scarring shaped like lover’s notes. Her heart thunders. Her vision swims.

_The ghosts are so loud here, she thinks_. _My head hurts._

* * *

Kakashi lets his head fall back as he stares up at the slow moving clouds. “Loud, huh?” he mumbles, pushing away some stray hair. His hand rests there, familiar pressure against his skin, and he closes his free eye while a gentle breeze picks up.

It smells like rain.

* * *

It’s a bright day, full of slow-moving people and slower clouds, the wet from the previous night’s rainstorm finally dried up, so it goes sideways.

Of _course_ it goes sideways.

Sakura sighs. She clutches a kunai in each hand while the boys battle the masked stranger and Kakashi does his best to tear a hole through Zabuza’s chest. It seems a shame to try and kill such an exceptional monster. Sakura wonders what his ghost will look like. It’s been riding half outside his body for years, a barely visible purple shape that has long since lost its human mold. She wants to see it. All of it. It’ll be _glorious_ , she just knows it.

Zabuza lets out a howl that ripples through her skin and dances along her spine. Behind her Tazuna is choking again. The fear is swallowing him up, closing his throat in on itself, sending tremors down his legs. Sakura wonders what it’s like to be afraid like that.

She can’t remember if she’s ever cried out of terror.

It seems unlikely.

A sudden cry breaks through the ice that’s formed around her thoughts and Sakura’s head slips to the right, to the ring of mirrors that has encased her teammates. Between the gaps she can see them. A heavy thump in her chest makes her suck in air when she sees why the battle has come to a standstill. Sasuke’s legs wobble, he takes a step back, his balance breaks. The fall seems to take an age but then suddenly he’s on his back with his head cradled in Naruto’s arms. Sakura can’t hear anything.

They’re too far away for her to read their lips accurately but she can see them move, can see Sasuke’s hand reach up and almost make contact, can see Naruto’s eyes flicker.

Sakura waits. Her eyes are trained on her teammate’s form, stiff and far too pale, but then her gaze flicks back to Kakashi’s battle after only a moment.

There is no second Sasuke rising from his body. No colored aura struggling for freedom.

Sasuke’s fine.

Kakashi is less fine.

Sakura watches him carefully, his dance with Zabuza lacking any of the kind of grace that she expects from either of them. Their attention is diverted from each other. Their blows slow. Zabuza’s eyes keep flicking back to the other battle. Kakashi can hear Naruto screaming.

Kakashi’s distraction she understands, but it takes a second for her to understand why the demon riding Zabuza’s back is trying to wrench itself out of his skin. _Of course_ , she thinks.

_Of course._

Naruto’s chakra is warm, like sunlight through a shallow pond, but the monster in his stomach is different. The sudden surge is red, hot, like razor sharp claws dragging down her chest, and Sakura’s eyes flick toward him the same time that Zabuza’s do. He’s worried about the boy, Haku. Kakashi’s fist thrusts forward.

Sakura’s head turns too slow to see what makes the sudden squelching sound. All she can hear are birds.

A fist protrudes from someone’s back. At first Sakura thinks it’s Zabuza, its intended target, but when her senses come rushing back she feels her eyebrows raise in surprise. Instead of the Demon of Mist his companion, Haku, is limply suspended from Kakashi’s fist. Red stains his legs. It leaves a pool beneath his sandals. Kakashi’s fist yanks back and Haku collapses, a pile of pale dead flesh.

Tazuna retches behind Sakura. She’s distracted. Haku is smiling at her, unbearably bright against the diluted color of the cloud-covered sky and the lowering temperature.

It’s going to snow.

She feels numb, unable to tear her eyes away from Haku’s slim form emerging from the hole in his body’s back like a tree sapling. There’s a pool of blood beneath him. It grows larger every second.

_“Hello,”_ he greets.

“Hello,” she whispers.

_“It’s very nice to meet you,”_ Haku tells her. _“In honest this time.”_

Sakura blinks. There’s a buzzing inside her ears, the last memory of birds whispering, and her chest feels tight. The boy feels timeless. Their conversation, this moment, is happening in suspension, everything else frozen in place. “A pleasure,” she says, “I’m Sakura.”

“I am Haku,” he says, so gentle that she’s sure her heart’s just broken. He looks more real than he did a moment ago, like his body in that pond of red is nothing more than a broken doll and this is the real boy.

Her throat is closed. It hurts when she swallows and then smiles, forcing the tears back.

Haku tilts his head. He says something but Sakura misses it, the real world filtering back in suddenly and all at once, Naruto’s voice a clear bell ringing out. Zabuza’s a weary obligation. He’s looking at her in an abstract way, eyes resting somewhere beyond her, but his face is definitely turned her way.

For a single, startling moment, Sakura’s sure that he can see ghosts too. Next to her, Haku is smiling at him.

Naruto’s speech is very inspirational. Educational, in Sakura’s case. When Zabuza’s voice cracks it’s a thunderclap that draws them back into silence, an inescapable pressure to remain rooted firmly in the present that mere mortals move through. Sakura can feel the exact moment she resolves to give Naruto whatever he wants. He wants the world, really, and Sakura wonders if that really is so much to ask when he can speak and make a monster cry. Haku sighs.

Zabuza is in tears. The guilty kind, the inspired kind, angry and pouring down his face and soaking the bandages around his mouth. It’s the most interesting thing Sakura has ever seen. She almost misses the gathered audience.

They show up like snakes, slithering along the sharp edges of her chakra. Her mouth twists. Her fists curl.

Gato has come to them rather than them to him.

She is not alone in her notice. Even in death, Zabuza is something to behold. Perhaps even more frightening, swords sprouting from his back like the spines of some forgotten beast of legend, his teeth sharp and bare and his mouth twisted into a snarl, his arms useless at his sides. Sakura is sure he will simply rip out Gato’s throat. He doesn’t, but she wishes he had.

It’s over too quickly.

Gato is limp, throat slashed open and seeping, and Zabuza is collapsed beside the still form of his subordinate.

Haku’s ghost is kneeling beside him.

It snows.

Sakura watches that beast clamber from the twisted form of the monster, watches it take its first stumbling steps, wonders if she’s ever seen anything like it, listens to the voiceless howl it makes. The hair on the back of her neck raises. She has goosebumps. Its feet the size of the man’s body, its head halfway to the clouds, its arms too long for its body, and Sakura is sure it’s the most incredible thing in the entire world.

Haku’s face is bright, vivid like his blood. When Zabuza’s ghost leans down, its impossibly massive face pressing in close to Haku’s own bright point of light, Haku smiles.

Sakura’s heart hurts.

Kakashi sings again that night and Sakura falls asleep to the sound of his voice rumbling in his chest. A ghost sits on the porch. A distant smudge on the horizon howls. They have decided to go with the strange little girl who speaks to them with veins of understanding in her voice, to trek across their home and back to Konoha. They are curious about the world and about her and about the other one. Uzumaki Naruto.

Tomorrow they will leave Wave with her. Tonight they wait and listen to the man’s voice. It is low, a rumble across dry earth, and through it they can hear Sakura’s heartbeat slow to it. The rhythm lulls the inside of the house to silence. They can feel how it pulls her into sleep.

They wonder about the future. About hers. About theirs.

About the boy who will be king, in a manner of speaking.

They are ghosts and do not sleep and so are content to lean against the thin walls of the house and listen to the man’s voice until it fades, the moon reaching its peak in the sky, and soon his heartbeat too slows and is claimed by sleep. They watch the moon trek across the stars and wait for dawn.


	6. A Handful Of Olives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It will be a cold day in hell when Kakashi manages to outlast her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UPDATED!

Zabuza’s ghost is a miracle unto itself, a constant distant gloom that Sakura is sure she won’t ever tire of. It gets no less impressive as they carry on.

Tall, bent inward, more beast than man, and wretched. When it howls the very earth under her feet shakes and her own soul twists beneath her skin aching to pull free. It moves slowly through the trees. Over the pale green tops she can see its head swinging from side to side as if searching for something, something it never finds.

Wave quiets after Gato’s death. The terrified cries of the lost wanderers are muffled now with the emergence of Zabuza’s shadow chasing them back away from it. There is a generally satisfied air and it’s such a change that Sakura marks its presence, allowing herself to breathe evenly for the first time since entering the country. Many of the closest ghosts were likely victims of Gato’s desire to control the country. Those who fell victim to the starvation that accompanies relentless poverty and famine. Others victims of his swords. Victims of their own terror. Collateral damage.

Justice has been served and so they are quiet.

The quiet part is really the only part that matters to Sakura, or at least she tells herself this. She _is_ glad for the silence, whatever else she might feel.

With the noises gone she takes time to explore the city again. This time her footsteps aren’t dogged by terrified spirits with no one else to plague, replaced by shifty children looking for a quick meal who she lets lift what little change she has on her. It isn’t much and she has more at home but it will help them. What little they take will buy bread to fill their swollen bellies or water to ease their parched throats or some sweets to lift their hearts.

The city is dirty. Trash has accumulated in every visible corner, piled high in corners she can’t see right away, and filled with beggars. The lamp posts flicker with inconsistent power. The shops are mostly dark, even at noon. Were it anywhere else with any other leader dead she might think they were in mourning but it isn’t and they are simply poor with enough tact to celebrate a death quietly in closed circles. It’s a sentiment she appreciates.

Death, however necessary, isn’t something to celebrate. It’s the first thing the hokage taught her and, perhaps, the most important thing. Maybe the only thing she will remember when she’s a name on a headstone.

Maybe some will be be celebrating her death with somber cheer behind closed doors too.

Sakura doubts she’ll make enough of an impact.

She doubts anyone will remember her.

Unwilling to linger in both the main streets and in her thoughts, she takes a side path that winds away from the shops and toward the residential district. As one of the poorest it’s in the worst shape. There are few people here now, she notices, most of the residents are transparent and voiceless, but even though her heart aches it’s a definite improvement. Even that knowledge unsettles here. Through the death of one man and two puppets the country has been changed. Through the actions of her team, though Gato’s death was never directly in consequence to Sakura’s own actions, something in the air has grown lighter and the hollowness has left some of the citizens’ eyes. 

There is little more she can do for these people—her contributions already slim—but already the country seems a wholly different place.

Tomorrow the bridge will be finished.

Tomorrow a new era of hopeful trade and tenuous alliances will usher in the promise of prosperity and these people, with their hunger-swollen bellies and their dark sunken eyes and their slow decay, will eat and drink and celebrate.

Tomorrow will be the first day worth celebrating in years.

Sakura tries to picture the celebration and it makes her want to stay and see it, but the mission is over. There are reports to write and secrets to seal away.

A ghost on her left catches her eye when he speaks. Sakura turns.

He’s little, about eleven and terrifyingly thin. A victim of starvation. Sakura wanders toward the alley mouth and waits while he eyes her up and down with a critical stare. There are tiny bruises on his skin that will never fade but there’s a hint of life still sparking in his eyes. His death is a recent one.

Sakura waits.

The boy thrusts out a hand for her to take and she carefully curls her fingers around his, fully expecting her hand to fall through. It doesn’t. Their hands connect. Sakura stares at the chilled hand in her own and then looks up slowly at the boy through her hair. For a moment she doubts he’s a ghost. That tiny pool of chakra in her brain is telling her he’s a ghost, proclaiming it to her every sense, and he _feels_ different against her skin, but they’re _touching_. It takes most ghosts years to figure out how to touch solid things and this boy has only been dead about a week. There’s no way. _Unless…_

Her gaze travels back down to her own hand. It looks solid enough, healthy and human, and she doesn’t feel dead. Maybe the ability to touch is a new one. She hasn’t tried very many times, assuming that it’s an insurmountable challenge if not an impossible one, but maybe that assumption was wrong. Maybe they’re touching simply because Sakura is _willing_ it.

It’s an interesting thought, one she files away greedily. There are few true records of her clan’s miraculous ability, none written in a manner that says anything without a great deal of circular bluster, and it strikes her again she really doesn’t know what she’s doing.

According to the two records of the previous members of her clan who manifested the bloodline, their abilities—while vaguely similar—varied greatly in application and power. Sakura frowns. This too could simply be a falsity. A product of understandable paranoia, a desire to withhold secrets that could level an empire.

The boy, at least, also looks surprised. _“You can touch me,”_ he whispers, brows vanishing into his short brown hair. It’s cut haphazardly, probably his own doing. His clothes are ill-fitting, an oversized shirt tied at his scrawny waist, his pants kept up by a dirty piece of cloth wound around them like a belt. His feet are bare.

“So it seems,” Sakura agrees with a soft smile. “But I’m special.”

His eyes narrow and he pulls his hand back, brushing it down his shirt. _“I’m Kei,”_ he introduces. _“Nobody’s been able to see me before.”_ He sounds suspicious.

Sakura tilts her head. “You know you’re dead, right?” she asks.

It’s an awful question but sometimes they don’t and it comes as enough of a shock that if they weren’t already dead they’d pass on from the news. Many of them have tried to die second deaths. It doesn’t work.

_“Of course!”_ the boy scoffs, hands waving her away like she has no idea about anything.

Sakura smiles weakly at him. The way he says it sounds just like she does when she can’t be bothered to be polite with someone clearly out of their depth. The boy has the same fire in her eyes that she has sometimes. She likes him. They would have been friends.

It’s an unpleasant, lingering thought.

“I’m Sakura,” she tells him if only to cool the building temper in his face. “Haruno Sakura.”

The boy’s eyes widen. _“Haruno?”_ he asks.

A wriggling sensation begins in the back of her head and starts to slip forward toward her conscious thoughts, but Sakura ignores it and frowns at him. He says her name like it’s familiar to him. She tilts her head. “Do you know me?” she asks.

_“No, but, that’s your clan right?”_ he asks, suddenly rushed and face warm.

She nods.

_“You have to come with me!”_ he demands suddenly, grabbing for her hand again. It goes through her skin this time, clutching uselessly at empty air.

For a brief, sickening moment the boy looks terrified. He looks like the world has dropped out from under his feet _again_. Sakura reaches for his hand. She doesn’t tell him, barely admits it to herself, but she shares his terror for that brief second. What if her ability was a fluke? What if she was simply imagining it? But no. Their hands meet and suddenly it’s solid. The world rights itself. His eyes narrow just a little in relief as he swallows, turns, and then takes off down the alley with her in tow.

It must look strange, her running with her hand outstretched to someone who isn’t there. She’s a little old for an imaginary friend isn’t she? Sakura’s used to it. The stares. The whispers. There’s no helping them. People will always make fun of what they can’t understand and this probably tops the list of things the average person won’t ever understand. The boy ducks down a side alley and takes her with him.

Sakura comes to a sudden halt. The boy continues, jerked back by her sudden stillness and managing to wrench her arm unpleasantly in its socket. When he turns to look at her he finds her eyes are misty. They are focused entirely on something halfway between worlds and blind sided by the mere thought something like that might exist.

It is an old man, terribly thin with shoulders that hunch forward and draw attention to his pronounced collar bones. His wrists are three of her fingers thick. It’s clear, by the way that moss has begun to form on his knees and waist and his lap is full of a bird’s nest, that it has been a long time since he last moved but he is clearly alive. Or something like it. Sakura finds herself unwilling to approach. If there is a thing such as divinity, then this old man comes as close as she is likely to ever see. The thought is humbling.

It is also full of blind terror and mindless reverence.

Sakura does not realize her hand is trembling within Kei’s grasp and does not feel when he steps closer to her and clenches her hand more firmly.

_ “Haruno Sakura,”  _ he whispers to her, gaining her attention, _ “let me introduce you to Grandfather Haruno.” _

* * *

Sakura breathes out slowly.

There are no allies here.

It is a cool reminder, one that trickles down the back of Sakura's neck with sudden surety when the hokage calls her into his office for a debriefing of their mission. The room is filled with smoke. His pipe pumps it out while he sits deceptively settled behind the overbearing desk in his official office. A look Sakura doesn't recognize sits in his eyes. It's one she doesn't trust, not even a little, and it makes her nervous the way that all uncertainties might when you know everything. She doesn't, she reminds herself roughly, know everything. She knows _almost_ everything. Within the village.

Outside the tall walls are secrets that make her fingers itch with the desire to wrest them from ghosts she hasn’t met yet. By force, if needed.

Secrets beget secrets, apparently.

When the hokage doesn't speak, she settles across from him in a steady and uncomfortable chair and takes the time to examine the office. She's been in it twice before, maybe three times. The walls are plain, adorned only by a few oddly impersonal photographs meant to give the appearance of being personal. They're full of the hokage and people he knows nothing about, whose names he likely doesn’t remember, like teachers, low ranking chunnin, students, a vendor owner, a boy selling flowers. A careful construction meant to appear like the hokage is intimately connected with his village. Sakura turns her head to soak it up slowly, taking her time to note the color of the drapes, the rug beneath the hokage's feet, the stack of paper by his clasped hands, the ash tray on the opposite side near his tea.

“Sakura,” the hokage begins, drawing her attention back to him with a snap of his wrist.

Folded carefully in her lap, nestled in red fabric, her hands clench so hard they tremble. Behind her shift the indistinct forms of the ghosts who followed her into the tower, their curiosity getting the better of them as they crowd closer to the desk to listen. A hand drifts over her shoulder and Haku comes into focus near her side. She doesn't look at him but she can feel the intensity of his attention fixed on the hokage, unwavering and calculating. It, among all these other dangers, doesn't make her nervous. If she misses anything, Haku won't. Her hands relax, if only a little, and she smiles at the old man and tilts her head.

“Hokage-sama?” she asks by way of greeting. “You wanted to see me?”

For a moment the look in his eyes shifts into something Sakura does recognize but the look lasts less than a second and she wonders, only for a moment, if she imagined it but no, his eyes are still harder than usual. She didn't imagine it. Something is eating the hokage alive from under his skin.

“Sakura-chan, I have received your team's report from Wave but I'd like to hear your summary of events, if you please.”

Sakura nearly bites her tongue. _If she pleases_ , she nearly chokes on the words because there is no real room to disobey. It isn't a request. “Of course, hokage-sama,” she says with a smile. “Which part would you like me to summarize?” If the way he glances up at her is anything to go by, the hokage is looking for something particular.

“According to the report, you went into the city just after the final confrontation with Zabuza, is that correct?”

“Yes, hokage-sama. I was curious to see if there was any change in the ghosts.”

“And was there?”

Sakura's eyes don’t narrow, sharpen, focus, or give any other indication that she could guess then at what he was after. Without so much as a flicker in her heart rate she says, “No. They were as incoherent as before. It happens sometimes, the trauma is too much for the souls and they are unable to retain much of their former selves. There are a few in this village like that as well, from the first shinobi war. They are...” _Tragic_. “Gruesome.”

Nodding along, as if he never suspected her of withholding valuable information from the village that might give it an edge when Wave regains its footing, the hokage sighs. He leans back and places his hands on his belly. His fingers, Sakura sees, are looking particularly withered. Frail just like the hokage himself, who seems shorter and thinner than he has. To come out of retirement at his age… Sakura pushes her tongue around her teeth. It helps her think sometimes.

“Is that all you wish of me, hokage-sama?” she asks.

“In such a hurry, Sakura-chan?”

“Kakashi-sensei had lined up training for us today, if I don't hurry I'll be late.”

It's an angry inside joke of hers, but the hokage doesn’t know that so he simply nods absently and waves her away. Horse and Salmon are on duty today, their bodies relaxed and their faces slack behind their masks, but they greet her softly as they always do and Horse gives her a gentle pat on the crown of her head. Salmon gives her a quick but excited thumbs up. Whatever for, she isn't sure but she smiles at her anyway. Sakura didn’t even lie because there _is_ training with Kakashi but it's not for another hour and he won't show up for at least another three. Sakura can picture him, moping over Rin's grave.

The image nearly stills her but instead causes her to nearly trip over her self. Sakura, partway down the stairs, sighs. Outside the sky is a clear blue, the clouds distant and lazy, the air full of warmth and life and birdsong. Sakura sighs again.

Well, she _did_ promise Rin that she'd try.

Her wandering down the steps of the tower becomes less aimless and more like a restless meander. The sun is already past the center of the sky. Sakura traces its projected heading down toward sunset and appreciates the heavy afternoon shadows in the stairwell. She eyes them as she plods down the spiral. It always seems endless. Mostly she takes a window but some days the endlessness is almost comforting. There are few ghosts in the tower. None on the stairwell.

_“Sakura-san,”_ Haku murmurs next to her ear.

Sakura stops, half turns, frowning at him. “Haku?”

_“The boy from Wave, what he asked of you…”_

There is a pause, a minute hesitation that Sakura marks absently out of habit but does’t really think about, waiting for Haku to finish. He doesn’t. Her response is lethargic.

“Later, Haku. Not here.” It’s a habitual response. _There are no allies here_.

It occurs to her, distantly, like a fuzzy light in the distance, or a half formed ripple snuffed out before it expands too far, that she may not be entirely correct in this measured assumption. After all, she has a team now. A sensei. The half-remembered sensation of Kakashi’s rumbling singing echoes in her fingertips as she wanders down the last few steps of the tower and takes off at a dead run. In the distance, over the residential buildings, she can see Zabuza’s rearing form.

His voice howls like high wind at midnight, crashing like thunder, rumbling like a mountain awoken from centuries of slumber.

The other ghosts are afraid of him and keep out of sight.

Sakura feels badly about how quietly relieved this makes her feel.

She doesn’t know she’s headed for the graveyard until her feet touch the branches of a familiar tree that provides excellent yet hidden views of the massive gravestones below. They are not the site of mass graves. Many of the bodies that belong to the names inscribed there have never been found, many too mangled to retrieve, many lost to the mountains of corpses that could not be sorted through. The name that Kakashi traces is one such body that could not be pried from beneath the boulder that pinned it to the ground.

The name below it is one that has seeped into the soil and may perhaps have helped a tree grow, the ashes growing warm and fertile beneath the rain and sun, for Kakashi could not bear to leave a second friend behind to be lost to time and the elements.

Sakura understands this feeling, perhaps better than Kakashi thinks she might.

Her chakra is not masked but it still takes Kakashi a moment or two to notice her and then a full fifteen minutes to acknowledge that she is settled, quite comfortably, on a branch in full view with an excellent vantage point of him and his pathetic routine, and there is no chance that she will eventually get bored and go away.

Sakura swings her legs airily and waits. It will be a cold day in hell when Kakashi manages to outlast her, she thinks viciously and examines her fingernails. They are getting long. Soon they’ll be long enough to be filed down into something sharp so she makes a note to pick up some shinobi grade hardener on the way home. Shinobi grade means that, within a few days her nails will resemble kunai in sharpness and strength. It’s a kunoichi thing that she would be foolish to pass up.

Eventually Kakashi sighs and tucks his errant hand back into his pockets and turns to amble over to her tree. His sandals make no sound over the gravel. It’s an ANBU trick.

“Hello Sakura-chan,” he greets.

It drives her budding nails into her palms to hear it so casually from him but she smiles at him anyway and returns the sentiment with a mocking, “Kakashi-sensei.”

It’s a bad way to start a training day but she can’t help it. Kakashi is the only person in the entire village who is so insufferable that even her permanent chill manages to crack like early spring frost and let a little of the underlying sharp leak out. It probably makes him feel special. It’s probably why he does it. Knowing the why and the how and the infinite smugness that must permeate every minute of every day only manages to crack the frost further. She just can’t help it. Sakura slips from the tree to speak with him.

“On your way to our training ground?” she asks, casual, examining her other set of nails, ignoring the faint puncture marks on her unattended palm.

Kakashi’s nose twitches. He can smell the blood. “Of course. I’d never miss an opportunity to train my cute students!” he tells her, gesturing widely and even having the audacity to summon a blush.

Sakura’s hands twitch, her nails nearly skewering her again. Kakashi doesn’t make her nervous, exactly. The memory of his voice tumbling over lullabies and hollow tunes that rumble with veins of magma and things meant for the deep reaches of the earth stays with her. It’s more like he puts her on edge. They are dancing. Dancing around each other, around the hokage, around secrets, around an infinite void of unknowns that neither wishes to step into.

Kakashi is dancing around being a sensei.

Sakura is dancing around being a student.

They manage to make it to the bridge only ten minutes late and the boys are so surprised that they simply follow mutely, stunned nearly into comas by the timely appearance of their missing team members.

It isn’t the worst way to start a day of training, but it isn’t the best either.

“Okay, my darling students!” Kakashi proclaims, sweeping grand gestures that make Sakura want to tear her hair out. “Instead of team building exercises, which I’m told shouldn’t be the sole focus of this team,” a significant glance in Sakura’s direction, “we’ll be doing some basics that I find unlikely the academy taught you.”

Sakura can _feel_ the interest pick up in the boys next to her and so can Kakashi. She can feel the beaming expression he shoots her way but ignores it sourly, wondering if he’ll having something she hasn’t dealt with before. Maybe they can spar sometime.

“Sakura may already know some of these,” is how Kakashi leads.

There is a noticeable clench of disappointment in her stomach and she brushes it away while Haku shimmers just out of her sight. Direct sunlight seems to dim some of his natural brightness. There’s nothing keeping him shadowing her but more often than not she finds him with her whenever she turns to look for him. She isn’t sure how to feel about that.

Zabuza hardly ever stays, preferring to rampage around the village terrorizing the old folk ghosts and cats.

“But she might also not know of a few I’ve been saving,” he adds, with a daring wink in her direction.

Sakura has to restrain herself from mocking him out loud with an answering wink and an audible scoff. It would have amused him but the visible restraint seems to amuse him nearly as much, and she wrestles with composure as he continues on his explanation of several chakra exercises aimed at control and execution in a vain attempt to direct the two powerhouses in a more meaningful way. It might stick with Naruto, though it might not do anything for him. Sasuke could use it but won’t.

“I’ve got something special for Sakura as well,” he tramples over the boys and their loud complaints, “something neither of you will have the patience for.”

Sakura pushes her tongue along her teeth. It’s a good tactic. She’s terribly vain sometimes, what with perfect chakra control and a haughty superiority complex she’s still working through, and Kakashi’s caught her hook, line, and sinker. He knows it too, from the sly expression his eye is sending her.

It makes her furious.

She’s frightfully curious.

Haku snorts next to her with amusement which he covers quickly with a hand. Sakura resists the urge to growl at him. Instead she stares straight ahead at the distressingly gravity-defying part of her sensei’s hair with enough force to light it on fire with an absent thought. It remains un-charred and she remains tense.

The exercises are both things she’s done before. Water-walking, the step up from tree-walking and the don’t-burn-the-leaf-as-you-burn-it trick, both of which she fully expects to stump them for days. Maybe weeks. What Kakashi has for her is interesting though.

Kakashi, like the miserable intuitive bastard he is, has already guessed her true ambition. The exercise is then, predictably, based around _medical jutsu._

Like a bucket of cold water to the face, Sakura regains some respect for him. It’s a gesture of peace. An olive branch reaching out for her and, by accepting the obvious challenge, she’ll meet him halfway.

Sakura tilts her head. Haku is reevaluating the man. Zabuza is quiet for the moment. He’s managed to find his way to the training grounds and envelops most of it. Haku leaves to converse with him. Sakura finds herself alone, mostly, but totally devoid of ghost companions. They stay in the city mostly. It’s quiet. Kakashi is offering a hand. Sakura takes it.

The trick he has for her is ANBU.


	7. Conversations With The Living And The Dead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This isn’t so bad, he thinks. Maybe a team won’t be… maybe it’ll be fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It seemed only fitting that Chapter seven be about Team seven. UPDATED!

Medical jutsu is hard. It forces the stubborn streak in Sakura to rear its ugly head. While the boys are fumbling with the most basic control she is working on the intentional circulation of chakra within her systems, the idea being that she should be able to call it to any spot at will. Or, spots, if she can spare the chakra.

Unlike her teammates, who howl as though they are dying when Kakashi makes them run through paces and grind basics into muscle memory, she understands the necessity of strong foundations. Know your stances, know your holds, know how to stay warm if it gets cold or how to stay cool if it gets hot, know how to handle a kunai, know how to trust more senses than just sight, know how to walk on water, know how to travel through trees, know how to dampen your presence. Sakura has heard more than enough stories of shinobi who might have lived had they remembered that one stance, or that particular kunai toss.

Basics will keep you alive when all else fails. It’s something every elder who ever lived past sixty as an active shinobi has drilled into her since she could walk. Their lessons are not lessons she will forget easily.

So when Kakashi says, _if you circulate your chakra enough you get a feel for how your body works and what it should look like when it’s healthy_ , Sakura listens because Kakashi was in ANBU long enough to retire without having to die first. When he says, _pool your chakra so it regenerates in other places and helps deepen reserves_ , she does. When he says, _work so hard that you feel like you’re dying, all your chakra gone and your muscles screaming, and work some more so that you know exactly how far past your limits you can go_ , Sakura practices water walking and her stances together until her chakra burns out in the middle of the river and she has to swim to the other side or drown.

Kakashi helps her out and says, with an appreciative glint, “Making use of your survival instinct. A nice touch, Sakura.”

There’s that appeal to her vanity.

She doesn’t even mind the familiarity of using her first name.

The boys are fed up but still full of enough chakra that Kakashi puts their competitiveness to work and has them run chakra enhanced laps until they collapse. They don’t have stubborn streaks like Sakura does, but they have something else. She can see it shining in their eyes. It’s a kind of fire that a single glance between them fuels into a billowing bonfire that circles upward into the heavens. She doesn’t understand it but marvels anyway as they take off like shots. Kakashi slumps down next to her and yawns.

_You haven’t even done anything_ , she wants to complain at him but it isn’t true. Not once, since arriving at the training grounds, has she sensed his presence even while looking straight at him. The boys, unable to sense their way out of wet cardboard, haven't noticed.

Sakura appreciates knowing now that even when he isn’t training, he’s training. It must be an ANBU trick, she thinks because in ANBU if you stop training then you’re as good as dead and Kakashi, who is very much alive, probably does more training than she wants to think about. Even the vague inclination of how much training he does makes her muscles ache.

“What do you think, Sakura-chan,” he asks idly, “think we’ll be here long?”

He is referring to the rivalry of his students but Sakura, who lets herself fall back into the grass and stare up at the fading sunlight, wonders if she might take it another way. There is no life or death situation that is forcing her to trust Kakashi. There is no, swim or you will drown. They are taking their time in this dance, have clasped hands maybe twice, but they are still very much two separate parts of the same act even if Sakura can see him from her stage now.

If she turns her head, she can see him folding gracefully into the crowd so slowly she is certain it will take a century for him to really fall. If she squints she can take it as an invitation. _Catch me_.

She does not squint very often.

“With those two,” she says carefully, “it’s likely, but who really knows?” Her head swings to the side and she squints at him. “Stranger things happen every day.”

Kakashi catches her gaze and laughs, startled, before falling back onto his elbows. “Stranger things, huh?” he mumbles.

It takes the boys three hours to wear themselves out enough that they can try the leaf trick again. This time Sasuke manages it. Naruto makes considerable progress, though a passerby might not know it from the way he makes a racket about still not beating Sasuke. It isn’t really that surprising. Powerhouses have always seemed to have impressively poor control.

* * *

_This is grandfather Haruno,”_ Kei whispers softly.

Sakura can see his soul. It’s nearly five times the size of his body, flickering like a billowing fire, and just as serene as the expression on the old man’s face. If she speaks to him, which will answer? The soul or the man?

It isn’t a question that goes without answer for long. The man’s eyes open and she can see that he’s long since blind, eyes discolored and milky, but she can’t help but feel that he can, in perfect detail, see her. Can see right through her wrappings of skin and cloth to her soul. Sakura has no doubt that the weight of his gaze is measuring her. Instinctively her chakra flares. The man’s soul brushes it aside effortlessly, taking hold of the blades she imagines at the edge of her intent and testing them. It feels wrong, invasive, and she tries to retract herself inward to no avail. She has been thoroughly caught.

Sakura knows better than to cry out. _Let go_ , she begs silently instead. The iron touch he employs both burns and freezes at once, sinking against her skin and melting her defenses. The thoughtlessness of the action serves only to make her struggle. The grip is like that of a human who has lost the ability to dole out their strength in doses, always others hurting by accident, unable to keep their fingers under control.

The soul like a god does not hear her, or does not care to, and pulls her closer instead into arm’s reach of the man’s decrepit body.

It is the first time she has felt truly afraid in years.

It is a different kind of helplessness.

There are no secrets that could sway this being, no information she can hold above its head, no truths that could shatter its peace. It is totally outside the realm of the living. It is not quite dead either. It bears a will that resists her own without even a scrap of effort and she chokes on sudden terror.

_This must be what Tazuna felt_ , she realizes. _Overwhelmed beyond all reason._ It is a thoroughly unpleasant moment of insight. Sakura hates it. It makes her feel small.

**_“I am Haruno Seto, first of this clan. You are my blood. You bear my daughter’s gift.”_ **

Sakura is sure she will throw up. Her knees are weak. The frightening soul makes sense suddenly, because this is the man who came from that far-away country across the sea on a continent that no longer exists. A man whose immortal blood was not yet tainted. The first Haruno, father of Ryouske who saw the souls of the dead.

She feels sick with awe and terror and from her soul being tugged at. It’s close to the surface. Another sharp tug and it will come free of her body. He could pull it from under her skin like a child might pluck a butterfly’s wings and, prone within his grasp, there is absolutely nothing she could do to stop him. Her ancestor’s hands are unshakable.

**_“Blood of my blood, blood of my daughter’s blood, gifted with her gift,”_** Seto’s voice is a rising wind that ripples across fields just before the tornado strikes, **_“hear me and heed my words!”_** He is a hundred great bells tolling at once, the sound echoing for miles. **_“I have seen into the light of the future and foreseen your coming and now you are here and now you must do as you were destined!”_**

When he speaks there is a pull that she cannot deny. It ripples through her. It beckons her to bare her soul and she finds no will to deny. It is a monstrous hunger that fills her up to her pores, seeps in through every opening, threatens to overwhelm her. It is not lust but it is certainly a desire of some kind. She nearly drowns in it.

What is her destiny? Why is this her gift? Why her? Why not her mother, or her own children or grandchildren? Why _Haruno_ _Sakura_ of all people, why a paper shinobi?

The questions rattle in her head. They grate against her senses.

Seto’s voice booms again, a hot wind lashing against her throat and parching her. **_“You will be great one day and have many enemies. You must be prepared. Trust is hard, I know,”_** if his voice softens for even an instant, Sakura cannot be entirely sure of it later, **_“but you must have allies if you are to survive.”_**

_Allies, huh_ , Sakura muses. A gentle lullaby stirs in her memory. A low hum builds in her belly. She closes her eyes and allows Seto to withdraw his campaign against her senses, feeling disoriented and dried up when his hold ends. She nearly stumbles. Kei moves to catch her but his hands fall through her skin. Sakura reaches out and catches his shoulder. It holds. Her theory is correct.

It’s always nice to be right.

Kei reaches for her hand. He’ll escort her home. The city holds nothing for her but a promise that she will, whether she wants it or not, find her way back again when she is in need of her great and terrible ancestor. Sakura makes a quiet promise to never need him. The ache he’s given her dips into her bones and she feels frail, like she might shatter in the next breeze that comes off the sea.

It’s disconcerting. She doesn’t like it.

She holds Kei’s hand firmly and lets him lead her through the sparse crowds to the woods. Kakashi is waiting for her on a branch. He eyes her with a single, flat charcoal eye. Sakura doesn’t speak to him but leaves Kei there in that thin wood with the tall and pale trees that look like the memory of a long dead wood. A forest of ghost trees.

* * *

Kakashi grins at her.

They, even more than the boys, need teamwork exercises.

When he says as much Sakura demands Kakashi take her out to dinner and pay for her meal and he accepts because she looks like she has something to tell him, something that maybe she shouldn’t say. Kakashi was too curious for ANBU and he’s too curious for students. Too curious for Sakura.

“Oi, oi, Sakura-chan,” he drawls, tapping his chopsticks against the booth. “You’ve got something to say to me, right?” He lets a lazy eye wander over to her. She hasn’t touched her udon.

“The hokage is nervous,” she says, “about something. It’s making him unpredictable.”

Kakashi understands suddenly why she chose a crowded civilian bar filled with angry dissidents and loud drunks. There are no shinobi in there. It’s an acquired taste kind of place. This is a conversation for a distasteful establishment such as _Yuu’s Cookery_. He’s embarrassingly familiar with it. From the way that Sakura eyes him from across the booth, she’s either aware of his familiarity or has guessed it at least.

“There’s nothing to be done for it,” she says, clearly frustrated, “but I thought you should know. The chunnin exams are coming up soon, which will only make it worse. Are you nominating us?” She doesn’t look up.

Propping his chin on his fist, Kakashi says, “I was thinking about it. It’s not till next month. We’ve got some time.”

They don’t really, but he doesn’t know that.

Nobody knows that.

Sakura nods. Picks up her chopsticks. Puts them back down. They’re a smooth metal. Personal. It stands to reason, Kakashi supposes, that she’s heard a horror story or two involving poison. The metal is lighter than weapons-grade. Light and designed to alert the owner of any detectable poisons, usually common grade.

If the hokage wanted to kill her, he probably wouldn’t use poison. Kakashi glances at his own untouched plate of rice balls. His appetite suddenly sour.

“Thank you for trusting me with this,” he says, reaching up for his mask’s edge.

Sakura hesitates then says, “About your problem…”

Kakashi’s finger, hooked around the edge of the mask near his nose, freezes and his eye is flinty when he looks at her. It’s a vague statement. She could mean anything.

Hesitating just a second, she pushes ahead. “I don’t think Obito is dead.”

“Oh?” Kakashi asks with a quiet, dangerous voice.

It means something, coming from her, that she bothers to say anything at all and he knows enough to know that but it still grinds against an almost closed wound.

“Rin-san hasn’t seen him in the village. Nobody’s seen him outside the village. I looked him up and I…” she pauses because that’s probably saying too much to a man who could kill her at least a hundred different ways, bare handed. “I haven’t seen him either,” she whispers.

Kakashi sits back and sighs suddenly feeling older, the air leaving his chest forcing him to slump in his seat. When he takes a breath, his chest feels a little lighter.

“Not dead,” he murmurs, “then probably just a traitor?” It’s rhetorical, lacking any judgement, and feels a little like he’s relieved. Kakashi feels… well… something, anyway. Maybe relieved, maybe something else. “Let’s keep this between us for the moment, okay? I want to check out your theory.”

Sakura tilts her head, waiting.

“I’ll take you guys to that place… where it all went wrong.”

She shivers. She knows about the boulder, about the sound the boy’s body made when it cracked, about the way he gasped for air. She knows that under Kakashi’s hitai-ate is the eye of an Uchiha.

Their meal is quiet. Neither really wants to eat. They switch orders and Sakura consumes the rice balls with about as much gusto as Kakashi stirs his udon bowl. It’s a little more than an olive branch. It feels strange.

They’re still dancing, after all, but the music has changed.

Kakashi stumbles out of the bar at least an hour later with Sakura firmly under his arm. It’s a testament to her stubbornness that her legs don’t simply give out as she drags his dead weight up the stairs and out into the cool night breeze. The shops have mostly closed. The late night restaurants are lighting paper lanterns out front. The sky is nearly dark. Stars will emerge soon. His students must already be ready for bed. Training was rough for them.

Sakura is just about the right height to fit securely in his armpit. She keeps him anchored. Kakashi stares dully at her hair and marvels at it. It’s about the same shade as bubblegum but it’s pale, like the color has been drained out of it and replaced by some grey. There aren’t any actual grey hairs but…

Sakura is speaking. “Sensei. Sensei? Kakashi!” She jostles him.

Sake burns in the pit of his stomach. He really should have eaten all that udon.

Kakashi squints down at his psuedo-student and grins widely. “Hey, Sakura-chan!”

There’s a moment where her vision dulls and she stares beyond him, fixed firmly at nothing. Kakashi wonders if there’s a ghost.

“Zabuza…” she murmurs, then, “Hatake Kakashi tell me where you live this instant so I can take you home!” She doesn’t stamp her foot but he can see her leg tense.

Overhead a crow makes a playful sound and Sakura’s head turns up to catch sight of the murder she knows is roosting along the high roofs. Kakashi sways as he tries to catch a glance too. His face feels heavy suddenly. There are two clawed feet settled on his forehead, feathers ruffling above him, a loose one falls away and Kakashi realizes a crow is on his face. He blinks thickly at it. Near his shoulder Sakura is laughing so hard that her shoulders are shaking. Kakashi twists his head to glance down at her.

He’s never seen her laugh. It’s… well it’s a sight. Her cheeks twisted up so hard it must hurt while they redden and her eyes crinkle. The flush on her face matches her hair. Kakashi blinks again, slowly, a crow weighing down his face.

_This isn’t so bad_ , he thinks. _Maybe a team won’t be… maybe it’ll be fine._

Sakura shifts him more readily and begins to shuffle forward again, muttering disparaging comments about how he’s really let himself go since ANBU. It draws a surprised chuckle out of him. He lets himself go just a little more and lets her take some of his unsteady weight. She cries out in surprise and curses him loudly until Kakashi is in fits of laughter and no longer able to stand straight.

They have to take a break less than a block later when Kakashi’s bladder protests. She dumps him against an alley wall and stomps to the end of it, tossing angry questions over her shoulder at him while he heaves a sigh and fumbles with his pants.

The stars are thick in the sky. They’re unusually bright.

Kakashi clutches the wall as he lets his head fall back to stare upward at them. “What’s that Sakura?” he asks, letting his head fall against the wall then twisting it slowly to where her shoulders are tense and her back is turned.

She almost turns her head but thinks better of it. “I asked if we were close to your apartment,” she repeats patiently, though it’s obvious and her good will is running thin.

Kakashi nods his head sleepily. “We’ll be there soon,” he mumbles, “just hold on.”

It’s a strange thing to say and Sakura doesn’t miss it but her head remains firmly away from him, focused on the thin crowd wandering the streets. It comes out soft and wrong. Wobbly, like he should be crying.

Down three blocks the faint shape of Zabuza moves through the buildings the way that rivers run slowly under sheets of ice. Sakura watches him snap at birds and screech at the stars. She has often wanted to scream at them and lets him howl instead, surprised to notice that she hasn’t noticed Haku’s absence. She wonders when he left.

Reflexively, she touches the small bracelet she bought impulsively from a Wave shopkeeper and finds it oddly warm beneath her fingers. She sighs.

Kakashi sighs directly behind her and loops an arm around her shoulders. “We’ll be there soon,” he repeats. It still sounds wrong. The alcohol twisting in his system is headed for a cataclysmic meltdown and Sakura can only hope she’s free of him by the time the tears start for real.

* * *

Sasuke feels ill in the empty halls of his childhood home, drawn and pale and shaking with the sweats from a nightmare he cannot remember but can guess at. There are no lights in the compound. It stretches in a sprawling maze he still sometimes gets lost in and yet each window is dark, every door closed, every room silent and empty. The silence is so thick there that it has weight. Sasuke can feel it press down on him from everywhere. It is unbearable.

He has to leave the compound, has to get out, get somewhere, anywhere, else. The silence is loud. It will eat him up if he stays.

So he goes. He forgets his jacket and his sandals and he forgets to blow the lamp out on his way out. It shakes when he slams the sliding door shut but doesn’t fall. Sasuke, somewhere in the unconscious part of his mind, wishes it would fall and shatter and set the whole compound ablaze. Then the stain in that room would finally be gone. Then he wouldn’t have to avoid the room or chance seeing it if he forgets to not look down at the floor. He could take the mat up, rip out the floorboards, get someone to replace the whole floor, he supposes, but doesn’t know how to ask or how to calculate the expenses or how to pay for it.

No, he thinks and shakes his head, better for it to burn down. Maybe while he’s sleeping and then he won’t have to think about what he doesn’t want to think about and maybe the dreams he can’t remember, but can guess at, would finally stop.

_No_ , he thinks absently and shakes his head.

The streets are nearly empty, the sun is invisible and low behind the hokage mountain. It is somewhere between eight and nine-thirty. The night crowd isn’t out yet. They will be just stirring from their beds or just getting off their shifts and warming themselves up for a rowdy evening. A festival, he doesn’t remember which, is approaching. The citizens are more lively. They’re coming out more often, laughing louder, speaking with more emphasis, and it rubs him the wrong way. He’s used to the deafening silence of his empty rooms.

The civilians he stares in the face every day have no idea the horrors that haunt him in those halls or the distinct lack of anything happening ever. The sky did not fall in when his parents died. The world did not stop its rotation. Time did not freeze. The ground did not open up and swallow him whole.

Life did the most terrible thing it could have: it continued.

Why didn’t his brother kill him too?

Sasuke stops in the middle of the street. To his left a stop is putting out its lanterns. To his right is the street that will lead to Naruto’s apartment, half a block away, and Sasuke has to wonder if that was his destination all along. He can’t be sure, he wasn’t thinking. His feet are cold.

They’re bare, his toes pale in the moonlight, he realizes when he glances down to find out why. It’s too far to go home to get sandals now. Naruto’s apartment is a just down the street and up a few flights of creaky stairs. It’s probably warm and inviting and, most importantly, someone lives there.

Maybe the silence gnaws at Naruto too.

That stray thought propels him into action. Sasuke takes the first step forward and finds himself jogging suddenly, stumbling those last leaps to the staircase that winds unsteadily upward, patched haphazardly by the cheapskate landlord. Sasuke pays it no mind, even when he narrowly misses a rusty nail with an exposed toe. Anything is better than that cold house.

He bangs on the door. There is half a second of a breath before he hears movement inside.

Naruto answers the door on the first knock, appearing in the makeshift peep hole first as a malformed eye, then a sleepy and mussed head from beyond the crack of the door. In the flickering porch light he looks pale too. There are dark circles under his eyes, his marks unusually prominent.

Something in Sasuke’s chest clenches.

Down the block comes the sound of shattering glass and raised voices. Neither boy misses how Naruto flinches at the sound.

They both have boogeymen chasing them.

The sound draws nearer. Naruto’s eyes flick to down the street continuously where the street lamp goes in and out. Tension lines his face. All weariness is gone. Instead he looks as if he were never asleep and his eyes never settle.

“Sasuke,” he manages, voice giving away his recent embrace with sleep.

A brief flash of guilt seizes the Uchiha heir but he pushes it away. He’s here now. He’s come all this way. “Naruto, I… it’s late. I don’t have any shoes.” He stares angrily at his feet.

Naruto blinks slowly then glances down. His eyebrows raise. He lets out a hollow laugh and opens the door a little more. “Whatcha doin’ barefoot Sasuke? You’ll catch cold,” he says and pushes the door open and he steps back. It’s a clear invitation for anyone else. Naruto says, “Well, you’re here, come on in.”

There are no words for the rush of relief that grips Sasuke so he simply grunts but reaches for the door eagerly, shuffling in and brushing lightly against Naruto who hesitates in the doorway. His eyes track movement on the street. His ears twitch with the sound of loud hooting, the echo of a slap, a short and quickly smothered scream, glass shattering again. Then he steps back and shuts the door firmly and does up the locks. There are six of them. Two chains, three dead bolts, one puzzle near the middle next to the door handle. That one’s a mystery. Naruto doesn’t touch it.

“Want some tea?” he asks, turning back to his new guest.

Sasuke, for all the apparent hospitality he’s being shown, doubts Naruto actually has tea. He shakes his head. The other boy grins.

“Good. I’m actually fresh out.”

Sasuke’s face twitches violently when he lets out a short and embarrassingly loud laugh. Naruto stares at him, open-mouthed. His eyes are wide and very blue. Sasuke does his best not to meet them.

“Well, my couch is free if you want it,” Naruto tells him after a thick moment of silence, stepping past.

It’s as good an invitation as any. _Thanks_ , Sasuke thinks.

* * *

Kakashi is dead asleep before he hits his pillow. Sakura has broken a sweat getting him up the stairs and into the apartment, managing to get into a fight with the mostly unconscious man about house keys and window-jumping before sweet talking her way into a sticky ring of keys. She tries to not think too hard about why they’re sticky as she tries them.

His face is peaceful in the moonlight, his hair a pale cloud in the blue shadow, and Sakura reaches forward and pulls his mask down. If he decides to vomit in his sleep, it’ll get out properly that way. A mask would prevent it and increase his chances of drowning, or so she reasons as she drinks up his face and tries to memorize the rare sight. It’s an ordinary enough face, on the handsome side, full of weary lines.

She pushes him about until he’s squarely on his stomach with his arms outstretched so he can’t shift easily, but she isn’t terribly worried. He’s mostly dead weight. Her hand lingers on his hair. A finger hovers over his eyebrow. It’s lax, totally relaxed. _Trusting_.

Sakura retrieves her hand. “Allies, huh.” The night isn’t so young and she’s exhausted. “Easier said than done,” she says, crouching down to whisper softly into Kakashi’s ear. “I don’t know if I can trust you, but I want to. I’m going to try, so don’t screw it up.”

Kakashi’s eye opens when she closes the door behind her with a soft click. _I want to trust you too_ , he thinks, still mostly incoherent and entirely too grateful that a soft bed is under his limp form. Her breath ghosting over his ear chases him into sleep.


	8. Concessions For Solutions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is a warm imprint near his wrist where Sakura’s hand fisted in his shirt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UPDATED!

Kakashi wakes sluggishly, rising from the depths of sleep as though slogging through a bog instead of simply working up the energy to open his eyes. When he finally does peel them open, the room is dark. The large window that opens onto a small, functional balcony is closed and its heavy curtains are drawn tight even though he remembers having left them open. It’s the kind of proactive thinking he’s less than familiar with. Sakura must have closed them.

The thoughtful gesture of his prickly student keeps the hangover at bay until the exact moment that Kakashi pulls open an edge of the curtain and peeks out into the world. It is a moment full of intense regret. Outside is bustling with the energy of high noon and konoha is a burning reflection of roofs, windows, and a stray mirror. The only consolation is that his window (shut and barred, he realizes), keeps the sound out.

_My precious student_ , Kakashi thinks as a tear escapes his hidden eye from the sudden vicious pounding in his head. _I will follow you to the ends of the earth for this_. He does not think he means it but a small part of him, still underdeveloped and unnoticed feels very strongly that if push came to shove he would, absolutely, follow her into any kind of fray.

_I don’t know if I can trust you, but I want to._

The memory flashes quickly through his mind, banished by the terrible ache and the shivers of dehydration beginning to wrack his body. There are things to do today. A memorial to visit, inescapable guilt to attend to, training the runts, the inevitable tension of the ballet he and Sakura are continually performing more in spite of each other than for each other. Another distinct memory from the previous night flashes through his mind. This one is less quick. It doesn’t hurry out the door but lingers and runs fingers along the counter. It wants to ask for coffee but doesn’t.

_The hokage is nervous about something. It’s making him unpredictable._

Kakashi’s head is pounding. It sounds like someone banging on his door. His hands are cold from sleeping without a blanket and he presses them against his face, blocking out as much of the nonexistent light as he can, breathing heavily through his nose. The banging doesn’t stop. If anything it gets louder, more insistent, and Kakashi’s eyes snap open. It sounds an awful lot like the door and not like the blood thundering in his ears, _suspiciously_ like the door even, and he spares a moment to wonder what time it is. It looks like high noon but looks…

…can be deceiving.

Kakashi turns the doorknob without even bothering to glance in the peephole and wonders if that will ever end up with him sliced to bits for his negligence. What greets him is almost like being sliced into bits. Naruto squints up at him in displeasure. Next to him, mussed, wearing what he was wearing the day before, with bedhead, is Sasuke who refuses to make eye contact with anyone. Kakashi blinks at Sasuke’s feet. They’re bare.

“…boys…” Kakashi mumbles by way of greeting and Naruto’s cheeks puff out.

It isn’t unlike staring at a twelve year old and Kakashi, after a moment, realizes that these two are _kids_. Naruto and Sasuke _actually are twelve_. It’s a disheartening thought. If Sakura were with them, she would catch the wistful expression. She isn’t though. Kakashi leans out the door and glances around the two sullen boys in search of their mussing teammate.

“Where’s Sakura-chan? Not with you?” he asks with a smile.

This is, apparently, not the right thing to say. Naruto’s face flames. Sasuke’s shoulders hike up, his cheeks redden, and he turns his head away forcefully. Their reactions indicate _something_. Kakashi levels a stare at Naruto who is desperately attempting to avoid eye contact now.

“You guys didn’t have a fight, did you?” he asks, leaning against the doorway, ignoring his watering eyes, ignoring the burning curiosity that wants to pepper them with questions. There is a glass of water near his bed. His curtains are closed. His window is a buffer between him and the world. He did not drown in his own vomit overnight. These are practical, small things that normal living people do for each other but Kakashi finds himself oddly warm regardless.

It’s like inside him is an empty dark house, abandoned for years, and someone has turned a light on in one of the rooms. Maybe just in the attic, now illuminated with a soft glow. Most of the house is still dark, from the outside you can’t even tell a light is on somewhere, but Kakashi stands just outside its haze and stares at it in wonder. It’s _terrifying_.

“We asked her to come with us but she told us to let you sleep,” Naruto supplies, sweating and still looking away.

It sounds like an oversimplification. _Suspiciously_ so.

“Well then let’s go see her again, now that I’m awake!” Kakashi says, not missing the brief looks of panic that ripple over the boy’s faces as he closes the door on them. But they don’t argue and they’re still there when he opens the door again after throwing on a pair of pants and something resembling a shirt. He foregoes the vest today, too tired to lug it around.

It turns out that Kakashi is spot on about the oversimplification. It makes him wonder how the boys managed to survive being so unobservant. Sakura’s mother answers the door looking more tired than a civilian should ever have to. There is an emptiness in the house that the boys notice now. They sense it as soon as they step over the threshold. The house, for all it looks warm and the stove is bubbling with food, bears an overt sense of something missing. Kakashi’s mouth is sour with the taste of loss.

The boys dally in the kitchen and wordlessly try and help, with varying degrees of success, Sakura’s mother who looks glad for the consuming distraction. Kakashi, with her permission, takes the stairs slowly.

It will not sound like her mother coming up the stairs.

Sakura will know.

Her door is closed and Kakashi cracks it after three soft, unanswered knocks. She is in bed with a comforter drawn tight over her head, but even through the massive fabric Kakashi can see that she’s shaking and she doesn’t stop even when he pads into the room. He leaves the door open and wanders over slowly, giving her time to yell or freeze or throw him out. When she does none of these, he sits gently next to her tiny lump.

Sakura’s breathing is loud and uneven. Kakashi stares out the window.

She’s been crying.

The loss is thickest here, like an invisible wall of mud he struggles to breathe through.

They sit there for a while, the room too quiet, Sakura’s breathing a little labored, Kakashi far too still, Sakura’s body far too small and full of too many shakes, until her mother comes up the stairs and her entire being freezes. Kakashi feels her stiffen next to him. He understands. It’s harder to hide from the ones you love. He meets her mother’s empty stare evenly and gives a tiny shrug.

“Sakura, honey, there’s rice balls if you want,” she tries but her voice teeters out.

She leaves the door open. Naruto and Sasuke fill up the crack, tense, tip-toeing, full to the brim already with their own grief, and Sakura remains tense. Kakashi shakes his head and they drift away. It makes him wonder if this is what ghosts look like, empty-eyed and aimless. It makes him reach out and lay a warm hand on her back.

Sakura can feel it, heavy on her side. It’s warm, even though the comforter, a blazing point of clarity, and after a moment she sits up. The comforter doesn’t cascade dramatically down from her shoulders. It bunches up, her face barely visible. Her hair is a mess. Her face is red and covered in splotches and dried tears. Her eyes are bloodshot.

She tries hard to meet Kakashi’s lone eye but finds, for all she faced down the hokage and came out alright, this is something she can’t do.

This is different.

Sakura’s head falls forward against Kakashi’s shoulder. “It’s papa,” she says softly into the worn thin fabric of the sad excuse for a shirt he’s wearing. “There was a caravan accident.”

Kakashi nods gently. They’re merchants. _Successful_ merchants. Accidents happen all the time. It sounds though, from the way that Sakura says it hopelessly, that it might not be accident with a capital A but an actual random act of chance. Those kinds of accidents are even worse. There’s no one to blame. No reason behind them. They’re just mindless acts of the universe crunching numbers and churning out outcomes.

Kakashi doesn’t move, doesn’t reach out and touch her shoulder or her face or her hair, doesn’t peel back the comforter, doesn’t speak. The silence stretches but it doesn’t wear thin. Sakura’s eyes close and she breathes in the faint scent of laundry detergent, bargain priced, and something that smells like sunlight feels, his shoulder warm under her face. It isn’t entirely uncomfortable.

“You’re a bad sensei,” she says finally, voice thick and the grief still licking at her heels. It will for a while yet, maybe years.

Kakashi stares at his hands. “I know,” he tells her. “You’re a bad student,” he returns.

There’s no venom in it. It’s almost playful.

Two years ago Sakura looked different, shorter, less sure of herself, scuffing her sandals in the dirt as she clung to her father’s sleeve and asked him for a favor from behind her hair and her from under her lashes. Two years ago Sakura had been ten and almost a week.

The memory rises unbidden and Kakashi can, in that moment of shared silence, recall that her hair smelled like raspberries and there hadn’t been any calluses on her hands. There are calluses now. Kakashi has seen them, felt them when he helped her from the riverbank, and whatever shampoo she used now carries no scent.

When she calls back her chakra she’s like a ghost.

Kakashi can remember that image so clearly though, the light streaming through the trees and dancing in her hair as it danced in the gentle breeze that came down from the mountain. Sakura had made brief eye contact. There had been fire there, burning behind the soft sea green, and it had frightened him. Two dead teams. _What if something went wrong?_

What if he couldn’t protect her? What if he got her killed? What if she died, alone somewhere with no hope of rescue or return?

Kakashi had said no. Sakura’s eyes had flashed, bitter and full of resentment that she buried less than a breath later. It struggled beneath the surface. Next to it understanding fought for first place and Kakashi, turning away and tugging his mask into a more secure position, hadn’t known which one was worse. It wasn’t a nice thing to be hated but… it was a terrible thing to be understood sometimes.

It lingered with him, that look. It woke up him up sometimes, when the nightmares chased him from slumber. It haunted him when he caught a glimpse of her in the training grounds, focused against lethal opponents and unyielding in the face of being absolutely overwhelmed. It might have been bravery. It might have been stupidity.

There were more than enough ANBU to fill up the empty place he had refused.

Kakashi knew most of them. Knew they were good agents. Acceptable teachers. Passable friends.

He caught sight of her more often and watched as she lost less often, as she pushed herself to her feet, as she refused to fall, as she dodged the first hit that might have really sliced her in half if she hadn’t.

“I know,” Sakura whispers from within the comforter and his shoulder.

It’s damp under her face.

Kakashi doesn’t mind.

“Have you eaten?” he asks and feels her head move in response. A no. He stands up and turns, coming right up to her face as he peels the comforter away from her. She really is a mess. Kakashi catches her face and rubs his thumbs under her eyes. He smiles. “Let’s eat then,” he says.

“Okay,” she whispers.

The music has changed again and they’re both stumbling to catch up and fall into this new dance, one they don’t quite know the steps to yet. It will take time to synchronize with these new rules. Sakura takes hold of his sleeve and lets him lead her down the stairs, slipping her feet silently over them. It’s an ANBU trick she’s learning.

The boys give her brave smiles from where they’re furiously rolling up balls, most of it ending up on their faces and up their arms, and Sakura gives them a weak expression in return. It’s a gentle look, an admission of weakness.

Naruto and Sasuke are more together than usual. Sasuke’s feet are dirty. Naruto bumps him and grins while the boy gives him a weak scowl. There seems to be a lot of weakness going around. Kakashi, bemused, sits at the table and accepts a small mug of tea from Sakura’s mother and compliments the shades near the kitchen sink. Around them the children pick rice off their hands and pick up conversation.

Sakura’s mother catches Kakashi’s eye and mouths _thank you._ Kakashi shrugs. The tea is warm in his hand. The children are loud at the table. The rice is good. The day is wearing on and his headache is mostly gone. There is a warm imprint near his wrist where Sakura’s hand fisted in his shirt. The music is slower than before. There are crows on the windowsill.

Kakashi wonders if there are ghosts in the house. He wonders if Sakura’s father is hovering nearby. He wonders which is worse, if he _is_ there or if he _isn’t_. He doesn’t really know. He wonders what Sakura would say if he asked her.

He leans his head back. A breeze drifts through the window. His eye slides shut.

It smells like rain.


	9. Truths, Consequently

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kakashi doesn’t know, she remembers suddenly, the thought as vivid as crow feet planted against his cheeks.

When Kakashi finally herds the boys out of the house sometime after dinner, Sakura watches her mother carefully and is surprised to find weary pleasure there buried under the grief. The heavy shadows under her mother’s eyes are lighter. Sakura had pinched her lips together and almost reached out for her mother’s hand like she had when she had been younger, remembering briefly what it had felt like to simply touch someone and have it mean nothing. What it had meant to reach out without fear.

Sakura had padded lightly up the stairs and left her mother alone in that dark kitchen, listening to her mother’s breathing, hearing the exact second it hitched, each agonizing minute that it wound up until the sobs began. Even with a floor and a door and stairs between them, Sakura could hear it. The sound drifted through the floorboards, echoed in her own tight chest.

There’s no time to collect herself. There never is.

When dawn breaks over the village and beads of light pull her from sleep, Sakura rolls onto her back and listens to the high singular wail of what sounds like every ghost in the village howling in unison. Zabuza’s enormous face is partially obscured by her window. Haku’s body occupies part of her bed and his cool fingers brush against her bare arm, passing through her skin but with enough resistance that her shoulders jump.

She presses her knuckles against her eyes. Bites her lip. Listens to the howling and fights to breathe out evenly.

The ghosts beneath are a single, gelatinous mass, shifting against and through each other, reflecting and pooling light until Sakura thinks she’ll be sick from looking at it. They all still when she leans out her window, the picture of greeting the day bravely. As one, their heads raise. Sakura’s arms dapple with goosebumps and her lips thin. For not the first time, she has a sudden flash of insight into what the kages feel.

The oddly attentive expressions beneath her spread out along the street and for several blocks in every direction, congregating around a singular slightly isolated figure. Sakura stares down at the sour looking man in a familiar hat, breathing through her nose.

The world still feels like it’s dropped out from under feet and everything still feels like vertigo. Her belly still feels like it’s been piled high with stones the size of her fist. There are still aches between her shoulders and along her ribs from the terrible sobs she couldn’t keep down the night before. The echo of Kakashi’s voice still lingers near her ears like the image of his slumped shoulders and his head bowed and his hands clasped are burned into her memory.

The image is crystal clear. It doesn’t waver, not even once, despite the wailing that drives her to her feet and forces her to brush her hair and stuff herself into some clothes that scratch against her sensitive skin. The same wailing that makes her forget her sandals on the way out the door.

It rides deep in her chest and rattles in her ribcage.

Haku is waiting for her just outside the door. Zabuza is terrifyingly still.

Something has happened.

He finds himself on her doorstep with no idea who she is and caring very little for the secret that spills forth from his lips like honey. It’s a secret that changes everything. Sakura stares at him with wide eyes and a parted mouth because this is _the_ secret, the one that will shift the balance. That will set in motion unthinkable things. Things that give even her pause, give her a brief pang of regret for her sensei. Some of the things the stranger whispers will hurt a great deal many people. Many of them were inevitable. One of them will hurt Kakashi.

Sakura shakes away the echo of an emotion she has long since cast aside and listens eagerly.

This man is a kage. The kazekage. The _current_ kazekage, now a dead man, now on her doorstep, now eagerly flinging away village secrets like festival tokens. He’s dazed, confused, furious. The things that fall out of her mouth send shivers up her spine because this man is by no means a good man, but he is a man tipping the entire world’s axis with his spiteful fingers. Sakura can feel the exact second it shifts. Later, after, she will remember it and remember with closed eyes the cold flow that dripped down the back of her head. A certainty she had never before felt and might never feel again.

_Fucking Orochimaru. Damn snake. Bastard killed me, took my face. Parading around like he’s me, like he’s the god damn kazekage, the fucking disgrace. All to burn this damn village to the ground. All for those damn Uchiha eyes. That fucking body._

Here, Sakura hesitates. Her hands are wrapped around a doorframe, her feet hesitating on a threshold, a decision swimming in the murky possibilities pooling in the back of her mind. If she steps forward, through that door, it will have consequences. It will shape the future of the village, direct the future of the world, and the deicision lingers in the back of her throat like acid. It stays there, heavy like cold stones. Her ears quiver with the soft ringing that fills them, filtering out every last thing the kazekage has to say.

There’s more.

There’s always more. So much more.

Sakura wants to hear it all.

_Fucking bastard son, tore his mother to bits, put that damn monster in him and he wrenched her insides out with him when he came out. Monster child. Murderer. Monster in his belly._

_Akatsuki._

The word rings through her ears like a bell. The toll is dull, impossibly loud from an impossibly large bell, and Sakura has to close her eyes to focus through the sound. The kazekage continues on with a red face twisted in rage.

Haku is listening, his fingers gentle on her shoulder. He will remember for her.

Sakura has to focus. Akatsuki. Where has she heard that name? Why is that relevant? Sakura closes her eyes and drowns out the sound of the wandering ghost to find that welcoming presence inside her. Deep, sleeping peacefully, is her sister. The girl stretches, yawns, comes to wakefulness while Sakura calls for her. Sakura forgets things, she’s only human.

Her sister doesn’t. Isn’t.

Haruno Sakura has memorized the bingo books from the last ten years. Haruno Sakura has spoken to the latest deceased elder and found that, as a ghost, he isn’t so terrible company now that his death has put his life into perspective. He’s convinced he was poisoned.

_Those miserable bastards,_ he curses.

_Akatsuki_ , her sister recalls with a soft, crooning voice. A secret organization operating just the last few years attempting to recruit high level missing nin for unknown—but undoubtedly nefarious—purposes. _They’ll_ _be_ _trouble_ _sooner_ _or_ _later_.

Sakura agrees. Her eyes snap open. The world has settled. It still leaves a gaping hole where her father used to stand tall and laugh with his whole belly, where his eyes were always warm and he never denied her anything, but now is not the time for such memories. Now is the time to weigh her options. The balance of power will shift soon, sooner than the village is ready for, and Sakura has to act quickly if she hopes to avoid the rising tide.

Sasuke and Naruto are the key.

Of course they are. They always were.

It makes her a little sick to think about because of course, of course they are. Of course the future of everything hangs on them. The two loose canons. The two broken little boys. Sakura nibbles on her thumbnail. It will be tricky. It isn’t a tightrope she can walk alone, she thinks, but she isn’t sure if she can ask for help.

_Who_ _would_ _I_ _ask_ _anyway_ , she wonders sullenly. The answer is obvious. She tries hard not to think it.

Kakashi.

Sakura isn’t sure if she’s ready. If _he’s_ ready. _There’s_ _still_ _time_ , she tells herself, _don’t_ _get_ _ahead_ _of_ _yourself_ _you’ve_ _got_ _time_. Not as much as she would like but some.

The kazekage is dead and, being a ghost, is incapable of going into fits but Sakura has very little doubt that he would have died again from them if he could. It’s lucky he won’t ever run out of air the way he’s carrying on. Even Haku seems bemused, his normally cool expression almost wrinkled between the eyes and his mouth a little thinner than usual.

_The_ _chunin_ _exams_ , the kazekage scoffs, _how_ _much_ _more_ _obvious_ _can_ _you_ _get? If you were going to plan the destruction of a village, when_ else _would you plan it?_

_When_ _indeed_ , wonders Sakura. She taps her chin.

There are things to do. A team to train. A war to avert. A a coup to undermine. A mess of innocents to keep alive. There will be time to mourn later. There will be a time to let the world fall apart, but now is not that time. Now is the time to plan.

Sakura squeezes Haku’s fingers. Now is the time to act.

There isn't, after all, _that_ much time.

* * *

The chunin exams are in exactly four weeks. Sakura makes it to the compound’s front door and raises her hand to knock before Sasuke’s grandmother tells her that he isn’t home, hasn’t been home for days, doesn’t sleep here anymore.

Sakura thinks of her room, cold, disused while she spends some nights on Kakashi’s couch. The apartment is sealed against sound specially. The person who does the sealing is out of town for a few more weeks so she sleeps there, keeps to herself, watches the sun go down and relishes in the overwhelming silence that creeps up and wonders how Kakashi can stand it.

If he isn’t at home, hasn’t been for days, then there’s only one place he’ll be. Sakura knocks on Naruto’s door. He answers before she raise a hand to knock again. There’s flour on his face. There are domestic sounds mumbling within, the sound of the tap running, a burner lighting, a cabinet opening, the fridge closing, bare feet on tiling. It makes her heart ache.

“Is Sasuke here?” she asks with an expression that says clearly that she knows he is.

Naruto humors her. “Maybe,” he turns and shouts into the apartment, “Oi, Sasuke, you in there?”

A disgruntled shout filters back from the kitchen. “You know I am you idiot, why—,” The sound of his feet padding along the hall is soothing. It sounds like life. It fills up the silence. “Oh, Sakura,” he says and stops.

They aren’t quite friends yet, rubbing up against each other curiously and finding themselves surprised when it doesn’t feel like sandpaper. Sakura tilts her head, smiles.

She says, “I have a present for you.” _You might not like it_ , her eyes tell him.

It’s the worst kind of present. She’s brought the seals for verification, a small history book she ‘borrowed’ from the tower library about her clan, and the answers to the questions that will flow out like a typhoon when she’s done.

“Can I come in?”

Naruto opens the door wider, shares a bemused expression with Sasuke, closes the door and locks it behind her with a soft click.

Sakura stands in the hallway, her flat against her sides, a bag heavy on her hip, and waits while Naruto winds his way down the thin hallways with low ceilings to the kitchen where Sakura finds the source of an interesting smell. They are attempting to make cookies. Sasuke is doing all the work and Naruto is eating the dough raw.

“You have something for me?” Sasuke asks and smacks Naruto’s hand away from the bowl.

Sakura hesitates. The bag at her hip is heavy. “I think you should sit down,” she says and she knows that she has Sasuke’s sudden and undivided attention. It’s an odd, not really pleasant feeling.

There’s no real way to handle this tactfully, but Sakura starts slow. They’re gathered around the table with its various foodstuffs and stains and one of Naruto’s jackets, and Sakura stares at her hands. She pulls the scroll, the scroll, out and passes it to Sasuke first. It’s smaller than the others, ornate and black with fascinating patterns inscribed into it. The seal is solid gold. Sasuke, from the surprise in his expression, recognizes it.

He reads it silently and then hands it to Naruto and waits, his hands folded on the table, his gaze steady, and stares at Sakura with dark eyes. She can tell that he has an inkling of an idea where this is going and doesn’t like it. Sakura doesn’t like it either.

“Five years ago,” she begins before Naruto has finished reading, “your older brother was ordered by the hokage and the elders to slaughter your clan to prevent a military coup. He was then strung up as a scapegoat.”

Sakura’s jaw clicks together. Sometimes when people look at her she can feel them trying to understand her. The way she works seems alien. Academics have never failed her. There is always a right answer, a correct format, a logical flow of information intake and processing. People are hard. They aren’t formulaic. They don’t always react the way she wants them to or thinks they should, and reading people is so _hard_. She’s gotten better at it.

Kakashi is turning out to be the best at teaching when he _isn’t_ teaching.

Compared to him, Sasuke is very nearly cakewalk.

She watches surprise bloom over his face, denial, fury, watches him get up and stalk around the kitchen, watches his hackles raise, his teeth grind together, his hands clench. Then, all at once, the fight goes out of him. He spins around and stares hard at her face.

_Tell me this is a joke. Tell me this is just an elaborate prank. Tell me this isn’t the truth_.

But it isn’t a prank. Sakura wishes she could be like that, wishes she could tell lies when it mattered to people who matter.

The truth is much worse than a tasteless joke.

Sasuke’s shoulders slump and he stumbles, ready to tumble to the ground, and Naruto catches hold of his shirt and manuvers him into a chair. Sakura’s hands are fists and blood pools inside her clenched fingers. She has never seen him look so…

So defeated.

It’s unpleasant.

_I’m sorry_ , she wants to tell him but she isn’t. Not really. This is for the best. _I’m so, so sorry Sasuke_.

* * *

The ghosts are louder now with all the strangers beginning to file into the village.

There’s no way to escape their new horrors. Not really.

They fill up the already brimming streets of her city and rub up against the dead there and stir up the nameless ones into a frenzy. They cry every night for three nights while the city fills. Sakura doesn’t sleep the first night. Her mother hovers anxiously by the doorway and watches as her daughter, her twelve year old child, crawl under blankets and hold her hands against her ears and sob until the sun slips over the hokage mountain and bathes the village in a golden glow that banishes the ghosts’ cries.

When Sakura, exhausted, finally falls dreamless and still, her mother closes the door and paces the kitchen instead. She nips and finger and summons an ANBU to fetch Kakashi. It’s not something Sakura had known her mother could do until she surfaces from her restless sleep to Kakashi’s low rumbling voice downstairs. When she hears him she slips out from under the covers. When she hears his feet meet the first few stairs she hovers anxiously at her doorway, by the landing, waiting. The tremors that come from a stomach full of knots and a head aching from a noise she can’t block out haven’t really stopped yet, but she ignores them and feels her whole body seize when Kakashi’s face appears around the wall.

He puts a single foot on the next stair and Sakura feels her whole body tense. A shock goes up her spine. He takes another step. It has been a month since she met that miserable old ghost of the late kazekage. _Kakashi doesn’t know_ , she remembers suddenly, the thought as vivid as crow feet planted against his cheeks. Hot breath against her neck.

The entire month, alone with the projects he assigned her for training, Sakura has been quietly wrestling with indecision. Guilt. Now Kakashi is stepping softly and slowly toward her with his hands low at his belly with his palms facing out. It’s a gesture of surrender and peace and Sakura sags against the frame to her right, her eyes drooping with the exhaustion she’s been ignoring.

She doesn’t notice when the tremors stop.

Kakashi pauses just as their heads reach the same level, a few steps beneath the landing where she stares at him and he meets her gaze. This is the moment, she realizes. There are secrets burning her up, swollen like stones in her black hole belly, turning her tongue to lead, and here is the moment.

Before he can open his mouth, Sakura says, “The kazekage is dead. He’s been replaced with an imposter.”

Because she hardly ever shares her secrets, she has no mind for tact. Kakashi’s expression blooms. It looks shocked but then, as he digests this information it shifts and looks so incredibly fond that Sakura’s belly feels sour. It makes her want to curl her fist up and smash it through his teeth. Her hands clench. Kakashi blinks and shifts his weight while he continues to churn through her bomb.

When he feels sorted he raises his head again and meets her gaze, his eye hard and his posture attentive. He doesn’t have to ask if she’s sure. Of course she is. If she wasn’t completely, entirely, without a single question or doubt convinced, then she wouldn’t have said anything. “Have you told the hokage?” he asks instead.

“No,” she says. Once she learned a hard lesson that the truth isn’t always the best option, but it has been a slower lesson that trust requires truth and that trust between teammates might be the only thing between life and death.

Kakashi nods, face lacking any judgement, entirely placid. “Are you going to?”

Here Sakura hesitates, not because she doesn’t want to tell him or because she’s searching for a lie or an excuse, but because she isn’t sure. Kakashi knows now and he is, to an extent, obligated to report it. Sakura eyes him. “Probably not,” she says finally. “Not yet,” she amends a second later.

Another thing she has learned about the truth is that it will, almost without fail, come out one way or another. There is no way, besides death, to hide it and, well… Sakura’s existence proves that not even death will keep the truth from the light of day.

That single, damningly discerning eye stares hard into Sakura’s own eyes and he asks, “Is that all?”

“No,” Sakura says and her brain makes a quick switch. First and foremost she has been an academic for her whole life and, given her ability, it never made sense to change that. “Orochimaru has murdered the current kazekage, now late, and replaced him with an imposter. It is likely Orochimaru is within the village. He may even be the imposter himself,” Sakura pauses to allow Kakashi his sharp intake of breath then continues, “Orochimaru was, until recently, a member of the criminal organization Akatsuki. It seems safe to presume that they continue to operate without him.”

Kakashi stuffs his hands in his pockets and sticks out his jaw, an expression Sakura has come to identify as his serious business thinking face. “Any idea what his goal is?” he asks.

“Yes,” Sakura means to say confidently. Instead it comes out a croak, weak and full of the anxiety that hums under her skin like a thousand angry bees. She has Kakashi’s concern now, as well as his attention. “Orochimaru seems to be in possession of a jutsu that, theoretically, allows for immortality. I don’t know how exactly it works but, to this end, he has his sights set on a new host,” she pauses and wills herself to say _Sasuke_.

Kakashi waits her out. True to his indulgent and negligent nature, which Sakura has come to vaguely appreciate after two months of violently loud and nervously energetic teammates, he never seems impatient. There’s never even a hint of hurry or irritation. All that Sakura has ever felt radiate off him is a vague sleepiness that never seems to leave him. For all the sloth he embodies, he might as well be a mountain.

"To this end,” Sakura begins again, clenching her teeth, “he has his sights set on the last Uchiha. Specifically for his abilities. Furthermore, I believe he needs Sasuke alive for whatever his goal is.”

Kakashi lifts a hand and makes to chew on a thumbnail, a task made slightly more difficult due to his mask, and nods absently. The faraway look in his eyes betrays nothing. Then he looks at Sakura and she can feel her stomach squeeze together with an emotion she doesn’t recognize but doesn’t need to because she has never seen him look so focused. It isn’t a bad look for him.

“Sasuke, a month or two months ago might have been easy to coerce,” Kakashi says, “but the Sasuke today will be a challenge. Especially because he knows the truth.” Kakashi gives Sakura a flat, measured look that she wilts under.

We're teammates, she wants to say, she and Sasuke, and he deserved to know.

“A ploy to use his desire for revenge against him won’t have the same effect now that it might have had, which works to our advantage. What Sasuke once desired above all else was power, power that Orochimaru could supply, and he won’t promise it without giving Sasuke a little taste.”

Sakura’s brain clicks. “He’ll try to give Sasuke something. Something to feed his negative emotions and to provide him a way to grow stronger quickly, something like…”

Kakashi makes the same leap she does. His expression is thunderous. If she were anyone else, she might have been afraid. “Something like a curse seal,” he murmurs.

“If we can keep Sasuke safe, the hokage won’t have to know about him,” Sakura says suddenly and realizes that it sounds like she’s pleading. It’s a strange realization. Two months ago she kneeled before the hokage and asked for the boy to be reduced to a civilian, a chakra-less beggar with no power to achieve his goals. The danger had been too great to the village. Sakura lifts a hand a chews on a fingernail. Kakashi watches her.

The next realization isn’t surprising. It’s an obvious leap. If not for Naruto, she thinks, then Orochimaru might have succeeded.

Sakura doesn’t realize then, and won’t for a long time, that she is only partially correct. Naruto played a large role. One not to be denied or cast aside, impressive and warm in its own right, but she is downplaying her own role.

In another universe, without the Sakura she is right now, Orochimaru _would_ succeed.

“We shouldn’t bank on the curse seal,” Kakashi mumbles, because he’s ANBU and because shinobi should never bank on anything.

“It’s the only way,” Sakura says, “nothing else would come close to giving Sasuke the kind of power trip required to drive him away.”

“We shouldn’t bank on it, is all I’m saying,” the man tells her, almost insisting. Sakura almost tilts her head.

Instead her shoulders fall a little. The world rests on them. A few lifetimes of secrets lie inside her. She is twelve and wants to be right, can see no other options or solutions. Inside her head two geniuses churn busily and her sister agrees with her. They’re _twelve_.

Kakashi comes up those last three steps and stands slightly curved down and in so that his face is near Sakura’s despite their height difference, and his gaze is hard and slate grey. “Will you bet Sasuke’s life on this theory?” he asks.

Her answer matters. Most people go through the entirety of their lives making choices and decisions that won’t affect more than the color of their shoes or what color to paint their house or what to name their children. Their answers to questions don’t matter like this does. Their answers won’t alter the fates of thousands, won’t save lives, won’t stop wars or gods, won’t condemn a little boy to death. Sakura’s head lifts.

“Yes,” she says and it _matters_.

“Okay,” Kakashi says. “Then we have work to do.” His hands warm and large on her shoulders. They’re heavy, but they don’t make her feel like Atlas. They feel like trust.

“Okay,” she says. It’s soft, but it is the mistake of the arrogant to believe that softness means weakness.

* * *

The chunnin exams are in four days and, to exactly nobody’s surprise, the peace doesn’t last.

The village comes alive. It buzzes with strangers both living and dead. Shinobi have started to come from every country to present the shining examples of their crop of youth, some more impressive than others.

Ghosts, she has learned recently, can hitch rides on anyone. What Sakura has done with Haku and Zabuza is special and unusual and will undoubtedly have unforeseen consequences, though she shoves away that sudden understanding for later.

Sakura discovers that ghosts can follow _anything_ because she meets _him_.

The wind changes and she hears him long before she ever catches sight of him, but when she does her blood turns to ice. The soul that rides half outside his skin is not _his_. It is another’s, an unknown’s, a monster’s. Sakura knows suddenly with violent clarity who he is.

This is the child of the late kazekage. The jinchuuriki of suna.

The first time she sees _him_ she tries to get a good look, to memorize him so that she won’t ever forget. It’s hard to focus on him. Instead she keeps getting distracted by the twisted faces that crawl over his back, that hover off the ground, that are little more than lumps of flesh, their expressions frozen in agony. Sakura has seen death. She has seen everything it has to offer, seen poison and amputation and burned out corpses and the bloated faces of drowning victims. This is something different.

She skips away and struggles to keep her bile down. This is _different_. The boy doesn’t frighten her the way that the ghosts do when they turn toward her with barely recognizable bodies and reach for her, hungry and aching and moaning. Sakura pushes her tongue around her mouth and breathes hard through her nose. There’s sweat around her temples.

If she can just avoid him, she won’t have to worry about it.

It’s Naruto, inevitably, who stirs up trouble. Sakura isn’t surprised. She’s not aware enough to be surprised, being too busy staring into the void that curls around _him_ and sucks in all the light around him until there’s nothing but a dense and inescapable blackness.

The girl, the tall one with sandy hair and wide hips and a sour expression, notices Sakura noticing and half-turns her head. Sakura sees the exact moment that fear swamps the older girl. It curls against the back of her neck like a lover’s soft kiss, warm and full of promise, and Sakura wonders what it feels like to be afraid of your own family.

“Gaara,” the girl, Temari, mumbles.

She’s choking on her fear. It’s like fluid in her lungs, filling her up with cold water. Sakura waits to see if Temari’s head will slip under but it doesn’t, too much practice treading water with a dead mother, an absent father, and a monster for a little brother. Next to her, the other boy, Kankuro, is the color of snow underneath his desert tan.

“Please don’t start trouble,” Temari whispers at the space just beyond her brother’s head. There’s sweat on her palms. Her lips look chapped. She’s older than Sakura by a few years but that still makes her a child.

Sakura steps in front of Naruto, just a little, a subtle shift of her foot and hip that draws his attention and suddenly she finds herself in the line of fire. There is no secret that could save her if he decides to act. It’s a hammering in her ribs that makes her realize that this time she’s afraid of the monster before her.

Somewhere overhead Zabuza looms with a face full of teeth. There was nothing about him that felt this frightening because he was, after all, just a man. A man who could be reasoned with. Nature itself didn’t bend before him.

Demons, though. Demons are chaos. Demons have no masters, are slaves to none, see no agendas but their own. In some respects they remind Sakura of her ghosts but with teeth.

Always with teeth.

There’s a flash of white in the darkness, of jaws dripping, of a voice like thunder. It’s a memory lodged deeply in the back of her mind that her sister keeps firmly in the dark, but Sakura can feel it slithering around sometimes when she looks too closely at the ghosts without jaws or thinks about what she can feel echoing in Naruto’s chakra.

“You,” Gaara says and it feels like a shockwave compressing her internal systems.

_Me_ , she wants to proclaim loudly but she doesn’t. Instead she lifts her gaze and stares straight into his eyes, unflinching even as her heart rabbits in her chest. It’s as though she’s screamed at him. _Me_ , her eyes declare. _What_ _about_ _me?_

Gaara’s stare is heavy. It weighs at least a thousand pounds and Sakura has to force herself not to widen her stance to bear it. There’s something in his eyes, flickering. Curiosity maybe, distrust, something like a cat watching a mouse. It makes Sakura very, very nervous. Her hands clench.

“What is your name?” he asks. It isn’t really a question, more like a demand.

Sakura lifts her chin. “Haruno Sakura,” she tells him in a deadly soft voice. A dull, distant part of her is curious. How well does he understand the village? It’s history? Will her name mean anything to him?

There’s another spark of something igniting behind the chilled veneer and Sakura feels herself catch hold of solid ground. Curiosity, fascination. These are emotions, easy ones to manipulate, and Sakura can work with that. This is an angle. _Her_ angle.

_Haruno_ , Temari mouths to her brother.

_The merchants?_ he mouths back.

_More than merchants I heard_ , she tells him.

Sakura can work this. The sudden tension is more telling than they probably realize, but if they know then what she has to actually do is very little. The right prod here or there. The right lie that they’ll scoff off but will ponder over at night until it eats them up. Sakura can tip-toe along this tight-rope with them but it’s _him_ that worries her.

Chaos bows to nothing and no one. Chaos is finicky. It kisses and tells and burns down your house while you aren’t looking then hands you apology flowers.

Sakura tongues the swollen spot behind her last molar where her wisdom tooth is trying to push itself into being. Her hands spasm. The challenge is rising in her blood against her will. Caution, she has to tell herself. Caution or he’ll eat you up and swallow your bones.

The ghosts that ride on his shoulders howl and try desperately to tear at his face, at his hair, but their fingers are insubstantial. They gnash their teeth and make terrible sounds.

Gaara asks Sasuke for his name.

He does not ask Naruto.

Sasuke lets his fingers rest on the boy’s elbow. Sakura averts her eyes. It’s telling. Everything about him screams a sudden gentleness that makes her world spin. Neither of them will ever laugh whole belly laughs or wipe their thumbs under her eyes. They will never sing low in their chests to help her sleep. They will never give her whatever she wants, no matter what, just because she asks.

Sakura swallows and tries to remember what she’s supposed to tell the hokage.


	10. Puppeteer Strings

Behind the turned backs of their teammates, Sakura and Kakashi decide to cheat team seven’s whole way through the exams. It’s an easy decision neither of them lose sleep over. This isn’t about progressing up the career ladder, winning, fairness, or even really the desire to compete with others to test the fabrics of their souls. This is about survival. Specifically Sasuke’s survival, but Sakura has this wiggling sensation that if she doesn’t tread carefully there might be a whole lot more on the line than just the last of a bloodline.

They can’t tell Naruto, obviously, because sometimes he has these spurting fits of integrity that become detrimental. They can’t tell Sasuke because he still isn’t speaking to Sakura. It’s not personal. He’s not really speaking to anybody, but he refuses to leave Naruto’s apartment. Somehow the truth has made those creaky hallways worse. Who can really blame him?

Sakura keeps her head low the day before the exams start and spends the whole day in Kakashi’s apartment with the curtains drawn and the window shut. A quiet fan spins lazily on the ceiling. Sweat pools in her collar bones, slips down her spine, drips from her fingers while she stands in the shower and focuses on pushing her chakra around her systems. It’s exhausting. It keeps her occupied. Her nerves are on fire and her brain refuses to settle. The physical exhaustion keeps her mostly level, but she can feel the panic one stray thought away from bursting through.

Kakashi finds her crouched in the shower doused in sweat and smelling like anxiety sometime after noon. He balances his fists on his hips and watches her. There’s an unimpressed expression behind his impassive mask and Sakura refuses to meet his eye because she can feel the disapproval riding there. It’s harder to ignore when Kakashi strides forward and turns the shower on and a bucket of cold water drenches her.

Sakura gasps and straightens. The shock numbs her brain for a split second and she can only gulp in air and stare, wide eyed at her sensei. Kakashi’s hands are in his pockets, his stance relaxed. The book is nowhere to be seen. It takes a moment, but then he looks smug and Sakura splutters until she starts to laugh. Kakashi hides a chuckle in a cough. Sakura snorts and coughs when water rushes up her nose. Warm hands pull her out from underneath the shower head. There’s a towel suddenly around her shoulders. An arm blocks the view from her right eye as Kakashi leans in and reaches past her to twist the knob. The water dribbles to a stop.

The apartment is cool, the fan stirring up enough of a breeze to make goosebumps prickle along Sakura’s skin. Outside is sweltering. The streets are empty, the denizens too worn down to leave their homes. Sakura tugs the towel around her shoulders and focuses on the feeling of her hair dripping.

Kakashi asks if she’s eaten.

Sakura shakes her head. She forgot.

Apparently he learned to fend for himself properly somewhere along the lines of being a friendless bachelor, and he makes rice and miso for lunch. It’s bland, the kind of easy thing a teenager might make for themselves. Sakura makes sure to compliment him and eat seconds.

It’s a strange thing, sitting at his tiny wooden table. There are no chairs in the apartment, no pillows either, just straw mats very nearly pristine in how unused they are, low tables, a couch that practically kisses the floor, a futon that stays in a closet and goes on the floor. It’s traditional. It suits him. Sakura feels strange here, like she’s invading his space even though Kakashi was the one to offer it up as a suggestion to her mother.

It is the first time Sakura has slept anywhere other than her own house, barring the few away missions. Those were different. Those weren’t so close, so _personal_. Sakura isn’t sure how to share space with someone she still isn’t sure she likes.

“Have they announced what the tasks will be this year?” Sakura asks over her second bowl of rice, nearly finished.

Kakashi’s first bowl is half finished. His mask is loose around his neck. This, more than anything else, is what makes Sakura the most nervous. It is the first time in their two whole months of being a team that he’s shown his face of his own volition to any of his students, and the first time he’s shown it to anyone period in years. Sakura knows this because she asked around ANBU. They think it’s some kind of running gag, but Sakura knows better. She knows because Kakashi is avoiding eye contact and eating slowly and chewing thoughtfully and keeping his head ducked low.

“It’s in three parts,” he says, still not looking at her. “The first is a written exam. It’s meant to test how well you cheat. The second,” he pauses while Sakura rolls her eyes, “is in the Forest of Death.”

This catches her attention.

Kakashi nods, makes incredibly brief eye contact that lasts so little time Sakura isn’t sure she didn’t imagine it. “Each team must acquire a heaven and earth scroll. There are less scrolls than teams.”

Gazing somewhere beyond his head, Sakura nibbles gently on a fingernail. The Forest of Death is vast. True to its name it’s also ridiculously dangerous, full of carnivores, giant bugs, venomous snakes, natural pitfalls, and the worst humidity of all the village. It’s a recipe for disaster if you lose your cool to stress or fear. If Orochimaru is going to make a move, it’s in there.

Kakashi nods absently, on the same slow moving track of ideas. “Orochimaru might be hiding in one of the gennin teams,” he says. “Stay sharp.”

“The last test?” Sakura asks, pushing away her worry. It won’t help if she has a nervous breakdown even before she gets to the nervous breakdown part.

“One-on-one fights. If there are too many teams, they’ll do preliminaries to cut down the competition. These will be close-quarter with no audience. The next round of gennin not eliminated will be outdoors in front of as many people as will fit in the stadium.”

Sakura doesn’t ask what the hokage will be looking for. She can guess. Teamwork, flexibility, clear thinking under stress, raw talent, honed ability, strategic battles. There are serious doubts in her mind about whether her team, if they were really going in for the promotion, could pass. She has no doubt that she would but… Sasuke is too unstable right now and the point behind the tests could very likely simply escape Naruto’s notice.

“Have you worked out a counter-seal?” Sakura asks, putting her chopsticks down.

Kakashi pushes his around his bowl. “Yes. I’ll place it right before the exams start. Did you tell Sasuke…?”

Sakura’s mouth twists. “Mostly.”

Kakashi’s hand continues its despondent movements but he looks up, meeting her gaze steadily with an unreadable expression. “Mostly?” he asks.

Sakura stares. She can’t help it. The last time she saw his face was in the impossible dimness of his apartment while he was drunk and fussy. Now his expression is a smooth one. She stares at his firm jawline, his pronounced nose, his wide cheekbones. There’s grey stubble scratching his jaw and on his upper lip. It’s been a few days since he shaved. Her brow wrinkles.

 _Are you taking care of yourself properly_ , she wants to ask. Her mouth remains shut. Her eyebrows stay wrinkled.

Kakashi pulls up his mask before he pushes himself up to a stand, hand outstretched for her bowls. Sakura hands them readily enough. There’s a vague sway to Kakashi’s gait that isn’t normally there and it looks a little like exhaustion. Guilt lingers in the back of her throat. If she knew anything about sealing she would have offered to help, to take a little of the load. Feeling tight inside her chest, she shakes her head. Where all this compassion is coming from she doesn’t know. It unsettles her.

“So what _did_ you tell Sasuke?” Kakashi asks from the kitchen as he settles the bowls in the sink and turns the faucet. He reaches for the soap while he waits.

Sakura watches him scrub methodically. “I told him that our team, in particular, is in danger from an enemy of the village.”

“He bought that?” Kakashi asks, rising the first bowl and placing it gently in the drying rack. A towel for his hands has found its way over his shoulder. One of his hips juts out. His wrists are thin.

“Naruto told him about the kyuubi,” Sakura responds, staring at her own thin wrists nestled together on his low table. “Sasuke understands how desirable our team might be to others.”

Kakashi turns his head just a little. The hitai-ate hides the swirling eye underneath, but Sakura can still feel its gaze. He knows that she’s been sworn to secrecy. He knows that she broke that oath. He knows why, understands why, is caught between disapproval and pleasure at the trust she’s placing in her comrades.

The tap twists. The water stops. Kakashi places the last bowl in the rack. The towel cast over his shoulder slips down when he tugs it to drag over his hands. They’re warm from the water. Kakashi discards the towel on the counter. He turns and leans against it, bracing his weight with his palms so his elbows jut out. The moment stretches. Sakura stares at her wrists and wonders what tomorrow will bring.

Overhead the fan stirs up a sluggish breeze. Outside the sun is doing its best to dry out the village. Everything is still for the moment. The calm before the storm, the balance on the razor’s edge, the tight-rope act. Sakura’s hands are cold. Her hair is damp. She’s circulating her chakra to exhaustion again.

Kakashi rubs a hand against his jaw and sighs.

Sakura closes her eyes and listens to the sound of her heartbeat thumping steadily in her chest, hears the distant echo of Kakashi’s when she channels some chakra into her senses. He smells like wet earth and vaguely like dogs.

The night wears on.

Sakura wakes far too early the next morning and swallows down a squirming nausea that threatens to disrupt the calm of the apartment. Kakashi is asleep still. There are no wrinkles in his face, the stubble is worse, both his eyes are bare. Sakura tries to avert her gaze.

Vulnerability is a weird, not comfortable thing.

The morning starts slow. First Sakura pads into the kitchen to run through some basic stances and stretches, frowning at the stiffness that has to be eased away. Then she practices kunai holds. Then she forces her chakra once around her system. It moves easier now that she’s spent so much time thinking about it, leaping to her command whenever she calls, and now she uses it to ward the faint chill from her arms. No matter the season, konoha mornings always seem cold.

A soft rap draws her attention. Kakashi, in a ill-fitting shirt and baggy sweats stands in the door frame yawning into his hand. He wipes away a few patches of sleep from his eyes with the seat of his palm and scratches his stomach over his shirt. Sakura holsters the kunai.

“So diligent…” Kakashi mumbles, hair askew.

It looks like a cloud to Sakura. She bites the inside of her mouth to keep from smiling. “Did you want tea?” she asks, turning away from the addled jounin to the stove.

“Yea,” he breathes, still mostly dead on his feet.

Sakura wonders if he’s really as at ease as he looks.

* * *

“Sasuke,” Naruto hisses. He’s kneeling on the bed and shaking the other boy’s shoulder. “Sasuke!” The boy is dead to the world. The steady rise and fall of his chest the only indication that he remains mostly in the world of the living. Naruto’s mouth twists but half of it goes up in a sloppy grin.

The already distressed hairstyle his teammate sports is looking distinctly worse. Most of it, rather than just some of it, is fluffed up and tangled from sleep. Naruto sighs and tries to smooth it down. Sasuke has terrors sometimes, ones that make him struggle and cry out in his sleep and wake up with his sharingan swirling.

Underneath Naruto’s hand, Sasuke mumbles and twists. Suddenly there’s contact between Naruto’s skin and Sasuke’s and the blonde tilts his head curiously and frowns. No matter how many blankets Naruto gives him, the other boy is almost always cold. It’s like a sickness.

“Sasuke,” Naruto repeats, poking his cheek with a thumb, “Sasuke we’re gonna be late. You gotta get up.”

At first the blonde thinks that it’s time to give up and leave Sasuke tangled in the heavy blankets Naruto gave him, but then the boy’s face scrunches up and he opens a single eye into a thin crack to stare blearily up at Naruto. The blonde’s face lights up. Never give up, he thinks proudly, that’s my motto.

“Heya,” he greets.

Sasuke opens his mouth to respond but all that comes out is a garbled croaking sound. Naruto stuffs a hand against his mouth. From behind it he snorts. The other boy, unable to formulate any kind of thought has no mind to be offended even though he frowns.

“C’mon,” Naruto urges, “I made tea. We gotta hurry,” he adds when Sasuke’s eye slips shut, “or Sakura will get mad.”

Sasuke’s eye opens again. He gives the blonde a flat stare.

Sakura doesn’t _get_ mad. Neither of them have seen her get angry or even frustrated. Nothing slips past the cool mask she places over everything, but Naruto swears that once he saw her go white with terror. Sasuke doesn’t believe a word of it. Still, the mention of their other teammate stirs something in his head and so he swings his feet over and rolls. He almost takes the jovial blonde with him to the floor.

“Okay,” he wheezes. “Okay let’s go. I’m ready.”

Naruto does laugh then. It’s a bright sound. Sasuke doesn’t mind it the way he minds when other people laugh.

“Okay,” Naruto agrees and launches himself toward the kitchen. “Come get your tea!” he chimes and the other boy sighs from where his face is pressed into the questionably clean floor.

He really ought to scrub the whole apartment.

* * *

The chunnin exams are in two days and Sakura finds herself settled in the oversized cushions of the hokage’s unofficial office. Beyond the short wooden table he puffs absently on his pipe. Fighting down a wrinkle in her nose at the smell, Sakura wonders how much second hand smoke she can inhale before the reaction becomes physical and adverse.

The hokage sets the pipe down. It taps against the ash tray. He folds his hands over his belly and leans back a little to survey her from under his grizzled brows and with serious eyes. This is the second time she has ever seen him look so serious. It bodes ill.

“Hokage-sama?” she asks politely and waits while he collects his thoughts.

A wrinkle appears in the old man’s forehead. The stray thought startles Sakura and she has to reach for her tea and sip it to hide the flash of expression across her face. Every now and again she will remember that the hokage is just a man. A powerful, respected, fearsome man.// A mortal being. Just a man.

It’s easy to forget when she can see the subtle threads he pushes around the village and when the tales the dead tell are larger than life, things out of nightmares and the origins of the world. Things left for a different time. It’s easy to forget when she wakes up every morning knowing that her life constantly hangs in the balance. One wrong move, one slip, and her life is forfeit. To her, twelve-going-on-thirteen, it doesn’t seem fair that just one man has the power over the lives and deaths of so many.

It doesn’t seem fair that he is allowed to pretend to be god while his body fails him, his wrists thin, his eating becomes erratic, his coughs more pronounced, his head droops lower, his movements become slow.

The hokage is _old_ and old people _die_. This thought too, causes her hands to twitch against the mug she still has pressed against her lips. It’s hot, burning, but she focuses on the sensation. It’s grounding.

“The chunnin exams begin in two days and there are many strangers here,” the hokage begins.

Sakura nods shortly, eyeing him.

“Have there been any newcomers?”

There have been, obviously. There are new people stepping into the village every hour. It isn’t the living he’s interested in. Sakura has never outright told him that ghosts can travel, but she may have danced around it. This is not a lie that would benefit her. Sakura gently places her mug on the table and folds her hands together.

“I may have mentioned before,”

She has not and he knows it. “That ghosts appear where they have strong emotional connections. This is usually a place, a town, a village, maybe even extending to the country, but very rarely it can be a person.” Sakura tries hard to ignore the uncomfortable shifting of Haku and Kei while they lean against her.

When they touch she can feel their memories of the bags of skin and brittle bone shards that hang from _his_ shoulders and make gasping sounds in their throats. She blinks serenely at the hokage.

“The son of the kazekage is in the village,” she says, switching topics smoothly. The hokage will follow her leap. He wouldn’t be where he is if he couldn’t. “It’s a risk having him here.”

Never quite as mellow as he appears, the hokage shifts. “I see,” he says.

He knows about the demon in the boy’s belly. He must. Whatever’s eating him up must be something else, something far more pressing than two jinchuuriki in the village. More than an unknowable number of loose cannons. More than new ghosts. Sakura’s eyes narrow and her lips purse. The hokage sighs and grumbles as he shifts to get comfortable.

“Sakura-chan,” he says and his tone has changed.

It puts her on the defensive instantly. There are warning bells tolling heavily in her head. They ring in her ears.

“Hokage-sama?” she asks.

“There is another threat to this village, one that far outstrips a mere child. I’m afraid that I will have to confide in you. I thought I had more time but it seems that is not the case.” The hokage has never looked so worn. There is a frailty in him that Sakura has never seen before. He looks tiny in this room. His robes envelop him and his hat sits next to him, massive and discarded in this personal space. “ANBU have been searching for a cure, however it seems that it was simply a myth after all…”

It suddenly all makes sense. It hasn’t been her imagination these last few months. The hokage really has been shrinking, thinning, shortening, pulling in on himself as his body appears to fail. The hokage is _sick_.

“When I die the village will be in great danger. I have not yet chosen an heir. You must not allow Danzo to seize power even though he will be in position to do so.” The hokage leans forward suddenly. There is an uncomfortable desperation in his eyes. “You must find Tsunade! She must become hokage before Danzo!”

Sakura’s eyes widen. She can’t help it. “Tsunade… the slug princess? The sannin?”

Nodding, he says, “The very same. This is a very important mission. It is imperative to the village’s survival.”

Swallowing, Sakura says, “I will see it done, hokage-sama.”

“Good,” he says and leans back. His hands tremble. “Good. Yes, that’s very good. I’m glad.” When he smiles it is weakly and lacking in vigor.

On either side of her, Haku and Kei lean against her shoulders. Sakura can feel them trembling, sending vibrations through her skin, anxiety and excitement leaking into her own emotions and dulling them. This is an opportunity. This is a chance to come clean before he dies, to wash away the sin of secrecy, but Sakura can’t speak. The vibrations fill her up. Her teeth chatter. Her heart hammers in her chest. Before her, the hokage’s head dips and jerks up rhythmically. Sleep is calling him.

Sakura’s hands clench so hard that her nails slice open her palms and blood dampens her knees. Her jaw aches from pressing together. Her eyes water. The hokage’s form relaxes. A soft snore escapes him. Sakura presses her knuckles into her face to hide her tears.

 _It’s for the best_ , she thinks as her shoulders shake. _He had to die someday. This is for the best. Everything will be different, things will change_. Sakura swallows a small sob.

When she leaves the office, she carefully drapes a blanket she retrieved from a pile near the back of the room over his shoulders and lets her hands linger there. It’s the final sign that he’s nowhere near peak condition. He should have sensed her approach, sensed the danger. He should have her at the pointy end of a kunai, but he doesn’t. His snores follow her out.

 _This is for the best_ , she thinks again and wills herself to believe it.

* * *

“Oh,” Kakashi says, tone mild and vaguely pleased, “you’re all here.”

“Of _course_ we are,” Naruto says through a squished face. It’s screwed up in irritation. Partially at Kakashi, but partially at whatever Sasuke said before they showed up.

Sakura’s chest twists unpleasantly. They’re close. They’re close enough to help chase away the silence when it gets loud. It makes her hands twitch with the desire to clench. Sakura has decided to stop letting her body make telling reactions, and her hands tremble with the effort to remain smooth and open at her sides. If Kakashi notices, which he _must_ , he doesn’t say anything.

“Well it’s a good thing,” he says to the boys. “Your whole team has to participate or you’re disqualified.”

Naruto looks as though his heart has stopped. “ _Disqualified?!_ ” he wails.

Next to him even Sasuke looks perturbed and glances at Sakura who shrugs. Kakashi had failed to mention it to her too. That doesn’t mean she didn’t already know, but it seems to reassure the boy that their sensei is equally as negligent to all students in all areas. Together, Naruto and Sasuke send him a sharp glare. Kakashi smiles under his mask.

“Ah… sorry, sorry,” he apologizes without even a trace of sincerity. “I must have forgotten…”

 _Forgotten_ , Naruto hisses silently at Sasuke. _He just forgot, oh, alright_ , he says and makes a displeased face indicating it isn’t at all all alright. Sasuke makes a face right back at him. It isn’t as obvious. He’s always been less expressive, and there’s nobody alive as expressive as their blonde teammate, but there’s a delicate subtlety in his face that Sakura finds she envies. Her own face tends to be about four different shades of impassive.

Emotions are hard, especially when you’ve spent a lifetime repressing them. Seeing things that nobody else sees is a quick teacher on keeping things to yourself, both in your words and in your expressions, and Sakura has mastered the disinterested stare.

“Okay,” Kakashi says and spreads his hands to gain their attention. “Today is the day. The chunnin exams start and from the moment you enter this building,” he gestures to the one that looms behind him, “it will be life or death. You must not fail!” His eye glints with a fire that none of his students have ever seen there before and it drives home that this is serious. Their actions will carry weight.

The speech is mostly for Sakura, who knows the whole of it and who must carry her team through this ordeal on her back if she must. A tiny tremor takes up residence in her chest. Sakura’s hands shake. They curl into fists. She catches Kakashi’s eye and nods firmly, eliciting a howl of victory from Naruto and a tiny pleased grunt from Sasuke. They, at least, want to do well. They, at least, will take these challenges head on with the desire to beat them and move beyond their current selves.

It’s more than a little reassuring. Sakura, for the most part, basks in their confidence and shakes away her own nerves. Things will move quickly once the exams start. There will be little time for second guessing.

Sakura cannot fail.

If she falters, even a little, it could mean the death of her squad or their capture, and the destruction of the village and all its citizens civilian or otherwise. She cannot allow that. She cannot allow more ghosts. She _will not_ allow Danzo to take advantage of the chaos that will come if she succeeds.

 _You won’t be dying in vain_ , Sakura promises silently to the hokage who slumbers still in his office. _I will carry your hopes from the moment you pass. I will inherit this village’s will of fire_.


	11. Interlude at the Lake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have some filler material, ha ha, while I figure out what's happening

The first test is easy, a paper test to evaluate how well the gennin can cheat or how intelligent they are. Sakura can’t say this to either boy. They aren’t supposed to be cheating the way that she and Kakashi are, but she does tell them, “Don’t give in, no matter what,” before they push the doors open and Sakura sees through the first genjutsu so easily that she doesn’t realize her teammates aren’t behind her immediately and has to stop to look back at them. _What are you doing_ , her face asks.

It’s clever, really, she realizes once she figures out what’s confused them. An effective way to thin the ranks. Sakura links an arm through Naruto’s and drags him away, feeling just the slightest hesitation as he turns back to catch hold of Sasuke’s wrist. His hand misses and takes hold of Sasuke’s fingers instead. The boy stumbles but catches hold of Naruto’s outstretched hand firmly, scowl settled comfortably in place as he stumbles after Naruto who stumbles after Sakura. If she stops to think about it, she’d think it’s a clever visual metaphor for their real life working relationships. If only Kakashi was there to follow despondently after them.

“Where are you going?” a voice demands from somewhere behind them and Sakura turns, eyes very flat, to stare at the back of Naruto’s head. From the way he stiffens, he can feel it.

“Ah… the, the bathroom!” he laughs. “Gotta go when you gotta go, right?”

The grip Sakura has around Naruto’s arm tightens suddenly and she turns away, taking off with a stomp that jostles the boys into a harried movement after her around the corner and up the stairs, leaving their potential opponents yelling after them. Sakura recognizes them, obviously, and has no interest in a confrontation.

After all, who wouldn’t recognize Hyuuga Neji the prodigy of the branch clan? Who wouldn’t know about Maito Gai’s apprentice, the shinobi without any chakra, the gimp, the impractically impressive taijutsu user who will take the village by storm one day. Sakura has seen this team practice. She has seen the scars they lay bare when they move together, genin so long their spars always end in draws because they know the ins and outs of each other’s weaknesses with such precision they could fight asleep. It’s a beautiful thing to watch and she lets herself indulge sometimes. The way Gai handles his team is nothing like how Kakashi handles his.

There’s trust there, _real_ trust. Sakura can see it almost like little strings connecting each member, bonds so strong that she’s surprised when people are surprised by the strength of their loyalty to each other. It makes a hollow spot in her chest ache sometimes. It’s a good ache, the kind that reminds her she’s still human after all, the kind that forms sometimes when a sunset is particularly beautiful, or the light spills across the village roofs just right in the morning, or when Kakashi got a face full of crow feet and she couldn’t help but laugh.

Lee is yelling now, calling out for them to stop. Sakura ignores the plea. Naruto’s head is twisted back, watching for pursuit maybe or maybe just watching Sasuke’s face. It’s probably twisted up and sour. Naruto snorts. Sasuke sighs. Sakura wishes they were a better team. She wishes she had the heart to lie when it counted rather than the bravery to be honest when it mattered.

“Okay, look,” Sakura says finally once she’s reached the proper floor level, “it was a _trick_ ,” and Naruto, bless his disgustingly good natured heart, actually gasps. Sakura can’t help but wonder how he’s made it this far.

 _A trick_? His eyes ask, betrayal dripping from their very blue depths. It isn’t directed at Sakura but she looks away. Her grip on his arm tightens again and when she moves away Naruto moves freely with her, and if she turned her head to look she might see him glancing at Sasuke significantly. This is significant. Sakura is moving with them instead of without them or _away_ _from_ them. It ought to make them nervous, but Naruto just grins. Sasuke does a guilty little shuffle of his feet because he’s been ignoring her, not so much out of malice or spite or because he wants to actively avoid her, but what does he say? How does he act? How does he move forward? Sakura is… different on a level he doesn’t really quite understand fully.

“Ah,” Sakura murmurs and comes to a sudden stop. Behind her the boys nearly slam into her. “This is it,” she whispers softly, little more than mute air through her lips, but she pushes the door open without hesitation. _This is it_ , she thinks, _the real beginning_.

It goes almost exactly as she might expect.

Naruto makes a scene that makes Sakura want to throttle Sasuke for not throttling Naruto, but they just keep their passive stances on either side of their teammate and resist the urges to either roll their eyes or glance at each other in irritation. Naruto, predictably, takes no notice and finds himself alive in the center of a swirling cesspool of bad vibes. Sakura finds hands on either side of her arms. Haku is halfway phased out Sasuke’s skin, their faces melding together in an interesting way that makes Sakura’s lips purse. Kei has wide eyes burning holes in the back of the blonde’s head. She loops her little fingers around theirs. Haku finds this ability to touch an extremely interesting development.

It was a tiny bit of wisdom to remind Naruto don’t give up because the first test wraps up after a grueling session of questions that Sakura answers without even a second thought with _another_ test. This one is a test of mettle, one that sends a grand total of three teams from the room. Naruto makes another scene. Sakura stares out the window and watches a murder of crows reenact a battle playfully. She very much so doesn’t think about her well-intentioned teammate.

She knows he hasn’t answered a single question on his test. She understands this is bravado. She gets it. She wants to wrap her hands around his inspirational throat and squeeze until it collapses under her grip. Nearby, she can feel Sasuke’s exasperated affection. None of them have cheated and, in doing so, have somehow cheated themselves out of the object of the test entirely, pushing through with the brute strength of honesty.

Their team is a _terrible_ shinobi team. Sakura wants to cry. Her teammates are almost entirely dead weight, but she reminds herself forcibly _this isn’t about winning. This is about survival_. It rubs her wrong.

She’s almost always rubbed wrong.

* * *

Winter is the best season to watch the stars, anyone who lives in a rural area knows this, and so six year old Sakura trudges up the rickety stairs to the top of the hokage mountain every night without fail through the snow in her tiny yellow boots. Her coat is just too big for her, brushing her knees, covering most of her gloves. It has a hood that doesn’t stay on her head so she’s stuffed earmuffs on her head instead of worrying about getting windchill. At six, she’s still incredibly small. Her limbs are woefully underdeveloped, face full of childhood fat, her hands limber despite the stubby fingers and tiny palms, her feet shuffling inside her boots and causing her to trip more than once.

Overhead the sky darkens steadily and she picks up her pace, nearly at the top of the mountain. The faces are too large to be distinct now. They’re just shapeless rocks below. Sakura puffs out her cheeks and forces her legs to climb, the wail of the ghosts below is just beginning to pick up. It chases her out of her home sometimes and out of the streets. Tonight will be loud, she can feel it like an itch under her skin, so she trudges up the mountainside in search of some quiet she knows will elude her like it always does.

The memory is old and she doesn’t quite remember it, but this is the first time Sakura meets Kakashi. The _real_ first time.

The snow starts as soon as she tops the staircase, red faced with a runny nose and puffed out cheeks. Her chest hurts from the cold air and her legs ache from the exercise. Her hair fluffs out when she stops to pant, dragging more uncomfortable air through her lungs, but she’s made it up the stairs by herself for the first time. She’s done it. Sakura’s sister languishes in the back of her head like something out of a fairytale nightmare, something with a lot of limbs or a body like a snake, and Sakura _loves_ her for it _especially_ when her sister compliments her like right now. Her sister grins and crows and waves her too many arms in excitement.

Sakura stands up and turns and this is it, this is when she sees him through the softly falling snow, and feels her world stop turning for a moment. A lanky man dressed in black with a long coat is balanced carefully while staring upward at the sky, the snow falling gently to form small piles along his cheekbones and in the center of his forehead. His hair is silver, barely visible through the white. It looks like a cloud. Sakura can’t look away from him, from the confident slope of his eyelashes, the delicate arch of his nose, the warm dark coal eye half-lidded and staring at something far off in the distance. She watches as it slips sideways and catches sight of her.

Time stops then too. Sakura’s face warms a little, but if it’s from the cold or the curious stare of the stranger, she doesn’t know. When he smiles, his eye closes and crinkles a little at the edges. It’s a nice smile, she thinks. A little sad, but nice. She likes it. With a single gloveless hand the man waves and steps forward through the snow, away from her and toward the edge of the mountain, not stopping until he steps right off it. Sakura gasps and bolts froward after a brief hesitation. Her boots slip in the snow and she nearly slips off, arms wheeling desperately as she rushes to regain her balance and manages a miraculous recovery without a tragic plunge down the unforgiving side of a massive mountain.

A little ways below is the surprised face of the man. His brows are up, hidden by his hair, his eye wide and surprised, and Sakura realizes that he’s wearing an eyepatch. It fits him somehow, this lanky stranger with cloud-hair who hasn’t spoken yet. His eye crinkles again and he grins at her, his feet stuck to the side of the mountain.

 _A shinobi_ , Sakura realizes with more than a little embarrassment. _Obviously not just anybody would go jumping off cliffs_. She waves a little, peering over the cliff nervously, and receives another little wave in return. The sky is mostly dark now and pink splashes highlight the man’s bone structure, dimming with each second as he continues his backwards walk down the cliff and the light fails. When he’s finally out of sight, Sakura sighs and glances up. The wail of the ghosts is quieter up here but she can still hear it, but it doesn’t matter because she’s never seen the sky look quite so clear and so dark and so full of bright stairs that twist in patterns she’s never seen before. It takes her breath, and her vague memories of the stranger, away.

It’s a memory she recalls later as she dozes in the forest, the light of the first dust falling over the forest as she and her team huddles under the opening of tree roots around a dim fire. The echo of humming lulls her to sleep with the memory of snow. It’s just for a moment, but Sakura hates Kakashi again just a little and feels her chest ache.

She doesn’t know it, but Kakashi forgets about this too. When he remembers, there’s snow falling lightly across the rough dirt streets in some distant village somewhere along the border of Grass stuffed in some one-star hostel room taking heavy fire from a band of mercenaries. There’s a lapse in the firing squad, and Kakashi stares the broken window from where he’s slumped under cover on the floor. It’s faint, just the image of a tiny girl in yellow boots with a small round face pink from the cold and bright from the surprise. He remembers tumbling over the mountain and hearing the terrified gasp. Remembers the genuine pleasure from it, doesn’t quite remember her features, remembers the pink hair, wonders if she was that little girl with fire in her eyes who asked him for training.

Sakura doesn’t know this, but her heart might creak a little under the weight of this kind of knowledge. It isn’t a secret, isn’t a sealed file. It’s just an aging shinobi’s faded memory of something bright and full of life. It’s just a sliver of delight. A little something to hold down the overwhelming tide of despair and weariness wearing him thin.

It warms her too, just a little, to remember that Kakashi can smile real smiles. Little ones. Secret ones. Earliest moments of dawn ones. Sleepy ones. Sakura hates him so much it burns in her chest, but she thinks maybe she likes him a little when he blinks dolefully at the boys during training and looks so much like a scarecrow that she wants to bypass laughter and go straight for crying because sometimes the light slants through his hair just right and he doesn’t look so burdened. Sometimes he looks like a bent-over rail of a lanky awkward man and not like Atlas. It’s not a bad look.

* * *

 Sakura’s hands clench together the second her team bursts into the trees of the forest and don’t unclench until, a day later, she finally gets her satisfaction when laughter echoes around the forest and the air feels thick with _wrong_. There’s no doubt about who it is. There’s a reason they prepared for this. There’s a faint guilt attached to feeling so smug about being right, but Sakura pushes both emotions aside. Her hands go slack with fear, palms sweaty. This will go sideways if Orochimaru suspects anything, if anything goes the way he doesn’t want, if he decides to snap their necks instead of just laying claim to Sasuke.

The terror that radiates from the boys in that moment makes the pit of her stomach clench and her fingers curl because she kept this from them, knowing they’d mess it up she didn’t tell them about the horrifying madman maybe or maybe not running around the woods with the prospectives. They might forgive her, but they might not. Sakura can’t tell them. Can’t lose that tiny bit of trust that still lingers between her and Sasuke, that strengthening bond between her and Naruto.

It doesn’t matter.

Secrets have been eating her alive since she could talk.

In the end it doesn’t matter that Orochimaru’s bite won’t take either, because he bites Sasuke anyway and vanishes, and Sakura drags her team through the mud and through a pile of bodies to the tower and tries not to think about the way that her knees are shaking from guilt. Ignores the shame in her chest. Smiles at Iruka. Asks for Kakashi. Swallows the lump in her throat.

“Ah,” Kakashi says. It’s the first thing out of his mouth. “Looks like he took the bait then.”

Sakura is _miserable_ and she looks as bad as she feels, her hands clasped in her lap, her hair dirty and still full of leaves, her legs splattered with mud, her body shaking. She doesn’t look up at him. Her voice is small and faint when she replies, “Yes,” and closes her eyes so she can rub them miserably and bite the inside of her mouth to keep back the tears. There’s no time for tears. They won’t do any good.

The mattress she’s been dumped on to rest before the preliminaries bounces lightly. Kakashi slumps over next to her. He’s made it so that she’s on his right and he can’t, without some effort, see her and she wants to hold his hand and tell him _thank you_ but doesn’t because who does that. She’s a bigger girl than that. Angry tears sting her eyes and she scrubs at them stiffly, her free hand takes hold of Kakashi’s sleeve and clings to it. He sits with her.

The memory of his childish scarecrow face flashes through her mind and she gives in, leans her head against his shoulder, buries as much of her face as she can in one palm, and lets the tears overflow to dampen her dress.

Kakashi doesn’t know exactly why she’s so upset, but he can guess.

It drives a splinter into something soft in him to think about it critically, about how much she sidesteps her teammate’s questions, lies to them, misleads them, dances around them, makes them dance, all for this vague maybe future. Kakashi lifts his arm, jerking hers in the process, and then wraps it around her shoulders. She stiffens. Doesn’t push him away. Hesitates. Goes limp. It’s a win. Kakashi squeezes her gently and lets her muffle the sounds her chest is making by burying her face in his jacket.

Little yellow boots trip through his mind. A small, surprised face. Bright eyes full of fire and sea foam and the stuff stars are made of, yet undisturbed by the weight of the world, burn in his memories.

It’s a tenuous moment of calm. Her shoulders eventually stop shaking and her teammates eventually come back from the infirmary and eventually she can look Kakashi in the eye again. When she does he winks at her. Sakura does not look at him again very pointedly until the fights begin anew.

The preliminaries are uneventful somehow, what with the preemptive seal Kakashi placed inside Sasuke burning away the little bit of chakra Orochimaru left behind and Naruto doing well in his taijutsu. Sakura feels bad about how badly she trounces Ino. Apologizes profusely even though it feels like lies, even though Haku is standing next to Kakashi with an impassive but somehow approving face. Kei hollers next to Naruto. Sasuke is still avoiding her and averts his eyes, but she catches the smallest smirk she’s ever seen a human make.

It’s the finals that will be interesting. The month leading up to them will be quiet, unusually quiet even, anticipatory, full of training, full of planning, full of secrets. Sakura hasn’t been able to keep up with the influx of ghosts lately, most of them riding on _his_ back but some following curiously or out of anger. The late kazekage has taken up residence in the markets and grumbles with the old shop keepers that drift through them. Kei has found a few children willing to spill their secrets for a few aggressive games of tag and Haku has overheard a few interesting things for Sakura’s spiderweb of possibly irrelevant information regarding Kakashi’s interesting dilemma. Zabuza is mostly the same, but leads Sakura to a particular pool of bad energy. A snake-den. It’s surprisingly helpful and she lets him terrorize the street cats without comment.

She’ll be busy. She _is_ busy. The business never stops. It’s swallowing her whole.

Kakashi takes Sakura to the lake on the outskirts of the training fields after the break begins, just the two of them, and asks questions that make her chest ache out of a sudden affection for her terribly wonderful, lazy, perceptive, disgusting sensei. She doesn’t tell him she’s grateful but she knows he can tell. He’s intuitive like that. It makes her world a little less like the sky’s falling in, shifts her focus, unearths her theories, easies her worries.

Kakashi makes her laugh. “Well,” he says drolly, a hand stuffed under his chin, “I suppose he had it coming.”

Sakura stuffs a hand into her mouth in surprise. He’s talking about the late great kazekage like that, all bland and bored and rude and her eyes water as she smothers a fit of giggles. Laughing feels weird. She doesn’t do it very often.

The clouds that drift by are white and sparse. There’s no sign of rain. A strong gust races across the field and the grass ripples in response, small waves lapping the surface of the lake. It’s a dull afternoon. They brought a basket full of well-intentioned pre-purchased snacks after a mutual disastrous attempt to whip something up, and pass out a pair of sandwiches. They’ve foregone a blanket so they’re stretched out in the grass. It’s a lazy sort of day, something Sakura hasn’t had in a while. There aren’t any ghosts. Kakashi made her walk until she finally swore she couldn’t hear them anymore and then, and only then, did he settle down and compliment her on their proximity to the water.

Sakura loves him a little, that afternoon under the warm sun in the quiet breeze, and languishes in pleasant memories of tuneless dreams and snow under her feet. She doesn’t notice when she falls asleep but Kakashi does. He glances at her, grins wryly, and takes a hearty bite out of a block of cheese.

It’s a good day.


	12. The Beginning of the End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to remind my readers that Sakura is still a child in part one. Like a child, child. Not like seventeen and almost a grown-up. Like twelve and a tiny baby. She's unsure how she wants to feel about Kakashi and her team, which I hope is reflected by her flip-flop interactions with them.

The finals _are_ interesting.

The fights are okay for the most part except for the time when Naruto makes Sakura feel like she’s alive, not some corpse dragging its feet, when he smashes that smug face of Hyuuga Neji into the dirt for the most spectacular come-back in recent history. It’s sort of like she can feel her heart restarting after years of flatlining. Next to her, an uncomfortable one seat away so that Naruto can put up a barrier between them, Sasuke’s face glows against his will.

In the heat of the moment, Sakura makes a conscious effort not to look at him. It will make her chest ache. It will ruin this moment, this _victory_. Sakura reaches up and grips Naruto’s hand when he stumbles back into the stands, soaked in sweat and grime and more than his share of blood, and he stares at her like she’s grown an extra head and three extra eyeballs before blasting her a look that closely resembles the sun at dawn. Her head spins a little and Naruto grips her hand back before he settles between her and Sasuke. The boy on the end snorts in his friend’s direction and bumps his shoulders and says nothing, but he’s grinning and looking all sorts of ridiculously smug.

This isn’t the interesting part, it’s just a good part that Sakura clings to later. A last, brilliant memory. A desperate attempt to alleviate the tension. A calm recollection. The interesting part is what happens with Sasuke’s fight.

It was Sakura’s suggestion to hand Sasuke over to Kakashi for as much training as he could beat into him. One look at his opponent and nobody could disagree. _He_ is already appearing in the center of the ring, forming out of the sluggish tendrils of sand with the same wretched calm as _he_ does everything with. Gaara lifts his head and, even though she isn’t his target, Sakura feels a sweat break out on her back.

This is where it gets dicey. Sasuke isn’t even in the ring yet, just standing up to wander down the steps, when Sakura feels her eyes grow heavy and she brushes the genjutsu away with a sharp gesture. There are feathers. Her head turns first to her right then to her left, then she lets her head fall back. Hundreds of feathers, white and falling like snow, drift from somewhere above. Around her the roaring stops. Heads of civilians drop. For just a second there is total stillness before a resounding clatter of releases echo through the stadium, Sasuke’s voice next to her and Shikamaru’s mumbled breath two rows away among them, and Sakura waits half a second before she lunges to her feet.

It doesn’t matter that they’re fighting. It doesn’t matter that Sakura is lying between her teeth every other sentence. When she turns to Sasuke, they share a look. He joins her on his feet, a hand already dusting over Naruto’s hair before he slaps the back of the boy’s head and forces him into the world of the living once more. Sakura swings her head around wildly for… there.

Kakashi is already beside her, a hand outstretched. Somewhere behind him Gai is kicking up a storm with a pair of opponents pathetically outclassed, and Kakashi’s hand has blood on it. Not his, probably. Sakura’s eyes are flat, heavy. This is where she comes in, this is her element. Around her subterfuge clamors as shinobi clash fruitlessly against each other and the hokage and replacement kazekage begin their own private war. It’s a genial scuffle between two powerful old men. Sakura spares a chest pain for the pills she knows are tucked into the hokage’s office drawers, for the hospital appointments that have increased in frequency, for the slim file of diagnoses that seal his fate. Sakura wonders how much his fists have slowed. If he can tell yet that his body is breaking down, if it’s been breaking down for months or years, if he will survive this fight.

 _It’s for the best_ , she reminds herself firmly and shares a level stare with her sensei. Kakashi’s eye have flicked toward the kage booth more than once. She shakes her head once. Kakashi’s gaze lowers before flicking toward a hole near the stage, through which he has fled howling like something out of a nightmare. Sakura’s lips thin.

“Take Shikamaru with you,” Kakashi advises before he roundhouse kicks a ribcage almost straight out of an enemy’s chest.

“Okay,” she whispers. “Be safe, sensei,” she breathes over her shoulder.

“You too,” he mumbles. A kunai has found its way into one of his hands. It’s no use worrying about him.

This will become a pattern in the future. This quiet promise of safety and return between two boundless souls two steps away from a ledge, one skip away from the milky stairway somewhere in the cosmos. There will be a war, battles silently waged, scuffles against immovable opponents, close calls in alleyways full of rubble. There will be this promise echoing softly, dogging their footsteps as it does now.

It hides in Sakura’s shadow, clings to her slim form and underdeveloped muscles like the sweat that beads the back of her neck and between her shoulder blades at the thought of following _him_. It must be done and it must be them. Anyone else more capable is otherwise engaged, fist deep in bellies and backs, their sandals painted red, and none of them are her, or Naruto, or Sasuke, or Shikamaru, or Kiba, or the others who rise slowly as they shake the genjutsu from them like rainwater.

They’re outclassed, these genin. Sakura can see it already, but she can also see something that maybe she’s never noticed before. It looks like a fire, like houses inside them. Some are tall, practically tower, with lights on in every window, other small and mostly dark with just a few lights. Later she will recognize what these are, but now she just wonders at it. Inside each genin, as they reach their feet and collect around her squad, burns with an unquenchable fire of spirit that breaches the chill forming around her own spirit in an instant. She feels the frost shake free and her knees grow weak.

It is a crystalline moment, one she will never forget. In that single instant, confidence brimming over in these yellow windows of the houses of their souls, Sakura sees something. It’s the _future_. She can see it high on the horizon, forming in the distance with the rising sun.

 _The children of Konoha are the future_ , she realizes and swallows.

It’s dizzying how quickly her priorities shift without her fully conscious of it. “Protect the village” is an abstract concept. “Protect yourself” is instinct. “Protect those precious to you” is a sentiment that might as well be from another world, but it forms beneath her veneer of calm as her feet carry her towards the breaks in the arena wall where their prey has fled from. Beneath her skin, squirming like snakes, this sentiment solidifies.

High in the ramparts of the building, watching the battle of the century, Haku feels her shift. It’s subtle, but it will move mountains. His face turns toward where he can feel her moving away, toward the distant trees where _he’s_ disappeared to. Sakura, he knows, will be the current that moves those who will inherit this world to their destinies and that is why he is here. It’s why Zabuza is here. Why Kei is here. Why others will join them. Why, despite her acid and ice demeanor, Hatake Kakashi will follow her to the ends of the earth without really understanding why yet. Haku turns his head from her zigzagging path and focuses on the fight before him.

It is poorly matched, already decided. The hokage, weakened from his illness and age, will not survive it, but Orochimaru will not walk away from it unscathed either. Even well past his prime, the third is something to behold. Fearsome, even. Enough so that Haku, intangible and well past bodily harm, feels his soul clench in fear at the silent war that wages before him. The souls of those infinitely more powerful than him are clashing.

* * *

Kakashi is an unyielding force. Sakura wants to kick out his creaking, old person knees and smash his face into the dirt. Her jaw is tense, teeth grinding against each other. There’s something compelling about the way that Kakashi teaches through not teaching, something that she finds works for her when he gets around to actually being a sensei. It ends up less than spectacularly for the other two. Especially Naruto. The severe neglect in his areas of study, reinforced by the actual neglect of his previous instructors, means that Naruto doesn’t even have the basics. He has no foundation to build from. Sasuke would much rather ignore that the basics exist, though he knows them by heart.

It frustrates her. Kakashi treats her delicately, dipping in and out of her life, her training, her emotions like a hummingbird. She can’t catch him. His wings are a blur of color, a lingering scent of pines and mountain air, a flash of an upturned head, the ring of laughter. Low, coaxing, a memory of music. Kakashi’s hands are warm, large against her shoulder to correct her posture, against her ankle to shift her feet, around her wrist as he lifts her up and throws her. They’re rough, callused, meticulously clean. Sakura has memorized where each little silvery scar is, remembers the little imperfection under his mask. The patch of distorted skin under his lips.

Kakashi fascinates her. Sakura wants to break his arms. Her hands clench reflexively when he drops by unannounced and drags her to the training grounds, to a restaurant, to the vast surrounding fields, herb hunting in the woods. She has to wonder if he takes the time to get under the boy’s skin like this. The image of Sasuke and Kakashi drinking tea together while Naruto regales them with a wild tale leaves her skeptical at best, but it’s a rosy sensation of familial familiarity that sends her into lockdown.

The training before the exams gives her an opportunity for space. She pounces on it desperately.

“Sasuke needs the most attention,” she announces over dinner at their post-training meal. It’s, mercifully, not ramen.

Kakashi rolls his eye over toward her, swiveling his head. She sits on his left to keep out of sight, a habit he finds moderately frustrating and oddly charming. He knows it’s spiteful. When Sakura catches his curious stare, she frowns. Naruto is frowning too.

“How’d’you figure?” he demands, fingers sticky from rice.

“You’ve seen his opponent,” Sakura tells him. It should be obvious. Her motives might be from a desperate attempt to remove her sensei from under her skin, to keep out the perpetual sense of losing ground with her emotions, but her logic is solid. “Gaara is no joke.” She turns her head to Sasuke. “You shouldn’t take him lightly.”

Sasuke pulls a face, a tiny souring around his lips and in the corners of his eyes. “I’m not,” he retorts, small-voiced and bitter. That he responds at all is something.

“The finals are in a month. That’s not a lot of time. Naruto and I can muddle along with someone else,” she already has someone in mind for the energetic blond, and an interview at the hospital for herself, “but Sasuke can’t afford to muddle.” Her gaze is serious. Direct. This is no time for side-stepping, for half measures. “If you can’t hold your own, he’ll kill you.”

Sasuke doesn’t wilt, but he meets her gaze head on. The atmosphere has shifted and he’s picked up on it. Sakura is always serious, always distant, half a second away from bolting and heading for the hills, so when she makes a point to confront something it means things are serious. The hard line of her mouth and the way her knuckles pale a little cues him in. They may be struggling on an interpersonal level, but Sasuke knows her. The thought surprises him. It comes easily, _he knows her_ , and he realizes that Sakura is sharing something intimate with him in that moment. Concern for his welfare laid out in the open. Sasuke feels his heart thump in his chest, anxiety at this sudden closeness surging up.

Sakura breaks the contact first, swinging her head to stare balefully at Kakashi. Sasuke can’t really hide his relief. _When the hell did Sakura start to care about us_ , he wonders and honestly can’t find an answer because it just happened. Slowly, over time. Suddenly, they were in hot water. They were a halfway decent team.

_When the hell did that happen?_

“I agree,” Kakashi yawns amicably. “Just a guess, but you have someone in mind for the two of you?” Naruto turns an interested head to Sakura who pinches her lips together. Kakashi is frustratingly perceptive. The lazy stare he fixes her with is telling because he’s seen through her completely logical, strategic, deranged attempt to distance them from each other, but is willing to hear her out anyway. Sakura wonders why she hates this man.

“Obviously,” she sneers before she can stop herself. It slips out and Kakashi’s face blooms. For a second he’s too stunned to react, but then his eye widens just a little and his face lights up. Sakura fights her face, feeling heat rise.

Kakashi gestures, both hands out palms up, for her to continue.

“A particular individual, whom you seem particularly fond of,” she eyes him hard, “is in town. He might be of some assistance.”

It takes him a second but then he gets it. Kakashi’s eye widens further. He _gets_ it. A hand goes to his pocket where whatever his book of the week is, is permanently settled and his face goes kind of slack. Sakura watches it with interest. Kakashi is hard to read sometimes, and other times he’s ridiculously open. Now is one of those rare insight moments.

“And you?” he asks, eye coming back into focus and settling on her again.

“The hospital is offering prospectives training,” Sakura tells him after a brief struggle as to whether or not she should reveal her plans.

It’s worth it a second later when Kakashi smiles, approval oozing from his _aura_. “Nice choice,” he compliments.

Sakura seethes.

* * *

The thing is, not even someone almost all-knowing can predict the future.

This is a hard-earned lesson. One she has paid for dearly before, and now must witness again before her own eyes. Knowledge is not everything. It is not a physical item. It is a weapon of metaphor, of fact, and it is not all-powerful.

Sakura comes face to face with this understanding once more as the wind next to her face shifts, a gentle breeze precluding the hefty rush of Naruto’s jacket flapping. The crack that resounds could be the bark, bending inwards. It could be his bones, caving in. It could be his skull connecting soundly. It could be the sharp cry that twists out of her own throat or the hoarse grunt of anger that escapes Sasuke’s.

 _Overconfident_ , her sister breathes in her ear. _It has cost you_. Her voice is soft, slippery. It makes Sakura’s teeth grind together as her knees tremble uselessly beneath her, one sharp spike of terror from collapsing. She glances down at them.

 _Stay still_ , she demands of her traitorous body. _Stay still and carry me!_

 _He_ is waiting for their move, deep beneath the surface of the _It_ that considers them from behind a mask of thinly contained insanity. Sakura, unable to do much but observe, recognizes the veneer. It looks similar to her courage, to the calm with which she approaches any and all things to be considered. The beast is lying to them, lying wait beneath the underneath, and a sudden memory makes Sakura’s belly pinch unpleasantly as Kakashi’s voice warms the space between her ears.

 _Always look underneath the underneath_.

 _Damn mutt_ , is all she manages to think before a wall of sand rises before her. This is not a battle she can win. There is no monster in her belly, no floodgate of chakra full of bursting inside her, no superhuman hatred poisoning her from the inside out, no promises to keep.

In some respects her vicious fear of intimacy, even the most basic forms of friendship or camaraderie, makes her weaker than her teammates. It’s never been more obvious than now as Sasuke, trembling and coughing red into his hand, manages to coerce his already frail body into standing, into a defensive stance to protect them, to protect Naruto and even her. Even Haruno Sakura who has done the unthinkable. Haruno Sakura, who has burdened Uchiha Sasuke with nothing less than the ugliest of truths. Even now as his shoulders stiffen and his back straightens, it feels like reconciliation and even as his breathing sounds wrong and too loud in the sudden still it feels a little like forgiveness. And, worse, Haruno Sakura hates herself for the surge of relief that spills across her back.

There is a gentle stinging in her eyes but Sakura bites her lip hard enough that she tastes copper. Just a little blood. Just a little pain. The shaking in her knees comes to a shuddering still and from behind her come the frustrated grunts of their last teammate. Naruto’s hand on her arm has never felt so warm. He pushes past her but doesn’t step in front of her and another surge of relief, duller this time and driven almost totally by ego, that Naruto isn’t trying to protect her. Not really. They will all protect each other as teammates, as equals even if it isn’t really the case.

Even if they all know Sakura is, technically, the weakest link. It’s enough to still the rest of her shakes.

Naruto is _incredible_ Sakura realizes again, not for the first time. There’s something about him. It’s a pull, like gravity, that picks up everything and forces it into rotation around him as if the universe really does revolve around his desires. Sakura can feel it tugging at her hair. She can see it as it works its sticky fingers around Sasuke, pulling him in closer to the sun burning at the center. She can see the way Kakashi bobs in and out of orbit. She can even see Neji at the farthest reaches, Hinata too, Kiba, Shino, and all the others. They probably don’t know it yet. They probably can’t see the lines being drawn through them, stitching them together, to _Naruto_ , to the _future_.

It’s Naruto, after all, who holds the unshakable spirit to conquer all. It’s Naruto, after all, who will stop at nothing. Who will lead them, kicking, screaming, fighting, bleeding, sobbing, into that vast unknown that lies before them.

It’s Naruto who defeats Gaara.

Sakura can only watch, a glowing hand poised above Sasuke’s open arm to stem the gush of blood that pours out along his skin and stains her dress, as Naruto does the impossible. Sasuke inhales sharply when the summon, massive, impressive, _impossible_ , appears from nothing, exhales even more sharply when the summon changes to something with fur like a sunset and teeth and claws and howls so loudly it echoes inside their lowly human bones.

When it happens, Sakura sees it. She isn’t sure if Sasuke missed it, but she sees it. The battle is determined not by monsters, not by hatred, or by violence, but by _understanding_. By _reconciliation_. By throaty words scraped from behind Naruto’s teeth, by hot tears scalding the dirt below, by a bond formed suddenly.

It’s the second time Sakura sees a monster cry and she learns something from it. Something she should have learned the first time. Something she will not forget again.

She does not cry at the hokage’s funeral.

The sky does though. It opens up with the first shovelful of dirt, the first wet plop of earth atop his casket. Then another _thunk_ and _plop_ and then another. It fills the air until Sakura feels she might choke on it, dressed in a somber black dress with a single white flower and sick to her stomach. It was not a battle he was destined to win. _It was for the best._

Sakura hands her flower to Sasuke and vanishes into the crowd. There are thousands of them. Every single citizen dressed in somber black with shadowed faces full of tears, a procession flooding the streets, a single black line as if drawn across a map. Even the dead are there. Their faces are bittersweet, some his victims, some his friends. The hokage himself heads the procession wearing what he wore to his death, helmet tucked beneath his arm, gaze sharp. His eyes track her as she moves away. They feel accusing.

 _It was for the best_.


	13. First Warning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a heads up, I think I'm going to retitle the chapters at some point in the near future. Also there's going to be a massive time skip (maybe) soon in the next chapter or two. Not sure yet.

Sakura wakes to the sound of birds ringing in her ears. It leaves her short of breath and sweating. Terror has gripped her. Real terror, the kind that comes only from certain death when all one wants to do is live. It is not something she has experienced before. It is not entirely unwelcome.

She feeds the crows herself that morning instead of leaving a plate for them and they put on a grand dance in appreciation, reminding her suddenly of why she took to feeding them in the first place.

“I’m sorry I’ve been gone,” she whispers to them and gets pecked for her efforts.

All is forgiven.

None of them pass the exams but they are _alive_ so they try very hard not to dwell on the apparent failure. Kakashi is, remarkably, tickled pink they’ve all managed to survive. He takes them out to dinner and only tries to skip out on the bill once, relinquishing any control over his wallet after the first foiled escape attempt, and it’s obvious he’s given up too easily. It’s obvious none of them are in much shape to fight.

Kakashi closes his eyes. A soft pressure at the crook of his elbow warms him some, Sakura’s small hand balanced there. Unsure. He nods absently. The hand descends, becomes a firmer presence, and together they heave a sigh. On his other side are the two boys, exhausted, escaped from the hospital, patched up, laughing and shoving and trying their best to eat without help. It’s the first time Kakashi’s heard Sasuke laugh.

Inside him there is a house, mostly dark, nearly empty, just the attic illuminated. Sasuke laughs again and shoves Naruto’s face into his bowl. Another light flickers on. It’s unsteady, pulsing as if the power is surging, but it’s there. Kakashi squints at it full of wonder and terror. Overhead the small light that tiny pale hands turned on when he wasn’t paying attention burns brightly in the darkness, banishing some of it. Naruto howls and steals Sasuke’s ramen and another light clicks on. Kakashi turns helplessly to stare at it. There is more furniture here now, pictures, memoirs. The plant Naruto left at Kakashi’s doorstep. The only memory Kakashi has of Sasuke smiling. A blanket that Sakura brings with her sometimes on missions.

It’s terrible. All of it. All of it makes Kakashi so terribly afraid.

Things are going to happen quickly now.

None of them know it, but they’re standing on a precipice. On either side lay ruin, death, the destruction of all they hold dear, and they’re walking the tightrope together without quite knowing why they’re holding out their arms for balance and not looking down. Sakura can sense it, has known the decline will happen for years. It’s happened quickly though. Too quickly for her to see and, for all her knowledge, for all her hard work, effort, for all that she has begun to throw herself out of her comfort and open her heart, it will still catch her unaware.

It happens like this: a man dies. Not just any man but the hokage. The balance of power is uncertain and has shifted as other men, women, shinobi, civilians, all follow him into oblivion. They watch in horror as fires are lit. Fires consume their homes, their children, their own lives. Fires dot the landscape like groups of fireflies, glowing distantly that night, as shadows move swiftly across the country. They are coming to swallow up the last beacon of peace. They are coming for konoha.

Sakura gets only one warning. A ghost stumbles into town, a young woman with only one arm and leg, whose belly decorates the front of her dress. Her jaw is unhinged, gaping, but it doesn’t hurt her now. It just makes her speech more difficult, but Sakura finds her lost at the gates, unsure if she’s really dead, and coaxes her story from her misaligned jaw. Sixteen small villages, all burned. Everyone the shadows could find dead, others dying even now, some fled, just a handful on their way here. The shadows are following them. The grass is high, shifting as bodies move through it, a low hum whistles in her ears, pain in her shoulder and a soft _plop_. The blade has shorn her arm clean off. There is so much blood. The young woman claps a hand to her jaw, the next blade severing the nerves in her leg. She stumbles, falls, hits her face. This is when the hinges in her jaw come loose, cracked wide open, nearly useless. She doesn’t need it to scream.

Kakashi hasn’t made it all the way home from the ramen stand when Sakura finds him, whiter than the hospital sheets, a sheen of sweat drenching her face, her arms, staining her back dark red it bleeds through her dress. It comes out of her mouth in a tumble. There is no hokage to report to. There is nobody else she trusts, nobody else who could make the elders listen. There’s only Kakashi, listening patiently with a growing sense of dread beginning to show across his face as his hands ball into fists. His hands open forcibly, curling around her shoulders, and he bends at the waist. Their faces are close. His eye is direct, focused, compassionate and closed off, worrisome.

"Don’t worry,” he tells her knowing full well that nothing he could say will calm her now. Nothing he could do will console her. The time for consoling is over. He straightens, ruffles her hair, reaches out a hand for hers. Squeezes it gently when she gives her hand over. “The elders need to know,” he tells her and she nods.

“Yes,” she agrees.

It’s important, her coming to him first. It says something, a few somethings really, but now isn’t the time to discuss that. It will have to come later. Together they take off at a dead run and only her chakra control allows Sakura to keep pace with Kakashi as he bobs along the rooftops to avoid the slow foot traffic below. They are headed for the tower where the elders are deciding on a new candidate. They don’t know that the previous hokage left an heir, one Sakura has had no chance to find, one they may desperately need now. It weighs heavy on her mind as they move in unison, feet slapping against the tiles. Kakashi has fallen quiet, jaw working under his mask. Sakura remembers the young woman’s face for a moment, her muscles freezing as the woman’s sole arm gestured frantically and her throat gurgled as she spoke. It sends a trill of horror down Sakura’s spine. Her stomach churns.

Kakashi glances back and catches sight of the green tint to her face and slows just a little, attracting Sakura’s attention once more. She waves off his concern and doubles her pace. Kakashi watches her back gain distance on him, the minute tremble in her fingers the only sign of her discomfort. It makes his stomach compact. Sakura isn’t easily spooked.

“Is there anything else?” Kakashi asks suddenly.

Though she doesn’t slow her pace, Sakura does glance over her shoulder. She hesitates. Kakashi isn’t sure she’ll answer, but then her voice slips over her back and curls around his ears small and weary.

“Nothing solid,” she tells him. “Just whispers. I’ve been hearing things for months,” she pauses, “years really. Nothing to get a fix on. I was trying to…” she swallows, hands clenching and unclenching as the hokage’s tower grows steadily before them, looming with importance and authority. “I was trying to get something I could bring back to the hokage. Something real, not just rumors.”

“Tell me,” he says and she does.

“Something big has been happening, moving in the shadows. Nobody seems to know much of anything.”

“Odd for something that’s supposed to be big,” Kakashi comments.

Sakura nods. “Exactly. Odd. So I had a few… contacts poke around, turn over leaves, get something I could work with and, well, what I got was… unreal.” Her voice fails her and she leaps with Kakashi toward the first low-hanging window, landing and then launching herself up the side of the building. It’s quicker to run so she runs, gut in knots. “An army of monsters, a group of powerful people united with a cause, demons being sucked out of hosts…” her eyes slip sideways to catch Kakashi’s.

She isn’t on his left for once, he notices.

“Some not so dead people walking around,” she finishes. The meaning takes immediately.

Kakashi tenses. It’s a sore spot. Whatever hurdles they’ve overcome, however many lights have come back on, it aches. Sakura waits, doesn’t look back, lands on the balcony that opens into the now unoccupied hokage office and feels her heart contract from the sight of his things scattered about the room. They haven’t been moved yet. The photo of his family, just him, his son, his grandson, all wearing the same kind of smile, still sits on his desk next to the tiny electric desk stove. An instinctual _fire hazard_ runs through her head. The spare hokage hat hangs behind his chair. That stack of paperwork, forever unfinished, sits on the opposite side of his desk over the shut drawer that has a variety of knickknacks from his grandson: a bottle opener shaped like a leaf, a small collection of bad love poems, a bar of chocolate, spare keys to the apartment, and so on. Sakura sucks in air into her stiff chest. Kakashi hovers behind her, hands halfway between him and her back, unsure.

Sakura adores him sometimes and then hates him in the next breath. Now is one of those moments. The anxious care she can feel coming off him soothes her for just a moment, but then she realizes that the comfort she’s experiencing is giving way to weakness. If she feels safe for even a second, she’ll break down. There is no time for tears, no time for a breather, no time for Kakashi to lay his warm large hands across her shoulders or for her to put her head just under his chest and heave large ugly sobs. There’s no time for gentleness. Sakura steps away from the hands she can feel just behind her and strides across the office.

The hokage is dead now, his things will be cleared from the room soon. His family will come to pick it up. Every trace of him will vanish from this room that he sat through two terms in, that he decided the fate of the village from within. The chair that she shared her fears with him from will be packed up and shuffled into storage somewhere. The teapot they drank from together will sit atop someone else’s table or desk. Sakura swallows and opens the door. Kakashi follows her into the hall. The door echoes softly when she pushes it shut, leaving behind the last scraps of sentimentality behind to be packed into boxes and forgotten. It’s probably just as well.

The elders are a floor beneath the hokage. They don’t have a balcony for quick entrance like the village leader, being generally far less skilled and able in an assassination attempt situation, and give up the privilege of seeing the sunrise or sunset in exchange for safety. Today Horse and Sparrow stand outside their doors. Sakura can’t see their eyes, but she can feel their scrutiny. Sparrow was never really her teacher. Horse opens the door without comment or hesitation, gaining a significant glance from the other ANBU who makes no move to allow either Sakura or Kakashi in. This eases some when Kakashi shifts his weight and levels a stare at the blank mask hiding Sparrow’s face. Beneath it, Sakura imagines she is sweating some. They are allowed in without further incident. Horse ruffles her hair some as she passes. It doesn’t make her smile.

The elders are still there, grown sluggish from the long hours of the evening but they snap to when they find themselves confronted by the copy cat and the number one security risk in the whole village. Their eyes are beady and suspicious as they appraise her. Kakashi takes a sauntering step forward, a protective instinct that Sakura recognizes though the elders might not. Their gaze snaps to him.

“We have a problem,” Kakashi tells them.

Their faces are tight. Pale. Slowly, almost unwillingly, their eyes travel down his chest and across his shoulder to find Sakura’s impassive face. The look they fix her with is terrified, imploring. Sakura feels her heart squeeze for just a second out of pity because, aside from their shrewd diplomatic skills, the elders are not fighters. They have no mastery of chakra, their bodies too frail for hand-to-hand. They must always place their safety in the hands of others, never quite sure that they will make it through a conflict.

Sakura could not accept such a position. Such a weakness. The thought of it makes her knees shake and her stomach clench until acid threatens to bubble up her throat. Her hands are clenched so tight they tingle when she opens them. Her voice is steadier than her heart when she speaks finally. They watch her mouth move with growing horror. It blooms across their face like blotted ink, draining their color in some places and smothering them with expression in others. Sakura is, for the first time, honest. She wonders, as she relays the information from the young woman’s ghost, if they can tell the difference between how she speaks now and how she has spoken in the past. She wonders if they can tell she has never been so wholly transparent.

If they _can_ tell, they say nothing about it. Instead the ask together as one, “And this is accurate? There is no doubt…?”

Sakura, gaze direct, back straight, almost thirteen years old, tells them, “Yes.”

They have no choice but to believe her.

There is no hokage and the chain of command is fuzzy at best and the only person who steps up to plate is shot down immediately to slink away grumbling, a person Sakura has kept a close eye on because she knows about him even though he knows next to nothing about her. She knows that it drives him insane, keeps him up at night, that he can sense her importance but not prove it. It gives her a tiny tickle of pleasure to think that for all his spies, all his agents, every information source he has, every informant, every anonymous tip, he still can’t scrounge up a single scrap of dirt on her. It’s her only real pleasure in this hard world.

Danzo clenches his jaw when she sees her standing among the collected clan heads. The Haruno clan is small, unimportant. Merchants. Yet here she is, dressed in formal black robes at a meeting of old men deciding the future of the village. His own scouts have confirmed her information. The danger is real, a threat even to him, so he accepts her position at the table with only one heavy glance in her direction. Seated next to her, relaxed posture wildly deceiving, is Kakashi. Danzo does not miss the way that Kakashi’s gaze keeps sliding to the girl, his student, or the way his hands stray from the table to hover near her arm and never touch.

The head of ROOT says nothing and files away the information, gathering anything and everything about her he can. There are more pressing matters to attend to.

Sakura’s hands are folded carefully in her lap. Voices raise and lower in a lull not unlike the soft rush of ocean waves around her and her thoughts stray. In this moment she is uniquely aware of her teammates. They will be settling into the apartment they share, sandals kicked off, voices low, exhaustion already piling onto their backs. Sasuke will make tea and Naruto will complain about the about of vegetables in the fridge. They will have cookies, maybe biscuits, something sweet with their tea. It will be a slow evening. It _should_ have been a slow evening, but the scouts that keep popping in and out are giving anxious and varied reports. Sakura’s own informant is kneeling beside her and confirming the worst of it.

Her lips bunch. Her face is probably pale, maybe even ashen, from the way that Kakashi turns his head all the way to look at her squarely. Sakura stares straight ahead and listens to the last of the report. When Haku’s rushed voice comes to a tumbling stop, Sakura sucks in a sharp breath and turns to Kakashi’s anxious gaze. Their eyes meet and his face blanches. Her face must really be a sight then, if he’s so reactive, and Sakura turns her head to the elders at the head of the table.

The slight movement draws not only their attention but the attention of all gathered. The frantic reports slow to a stop. When total silence fills the room, Sakura takes in a small sharp breath that rattles in her throat. She hasn’t said anything yet but the faces of the elders pinch. The color bleeds from a few of the clan heads.

“Tell us,” one quietly demands.

“A report has just come in,” Sakura begins. “there are fires on the horizon, just inside the forest.”

The heads titter. _What does that mean_ , they ask even though they know. They want for her to tell them differently, to answer the unspoken question with something other than sudden and heavy despair. She cannot. The silence that follows suffocates them. At the end of the hallway the door snaps inward, a red-faced shinobi, a foot soldier barely off her own team, streams sweat and captures the twin gazes of the elders. Her hands grip the door’s frame for support. There are tears, mixed with horror and terror, streaked across her face but when she speaks her voice is soft. It sounds like hopelessness.

“We’re under attack,” she whispers and collapses. Her knees buckle and give out and the room watches as she slides to the floor and stares at her shaking hands.

Then, pandemonium.

Clan heads explode from their seats, faces reddening, shouting orders. Their clansmen appear from the shadows, ducking in through the door, one cascading through glass to reach their master. Orders are shouted, demands made, quick conferences and alliances settled. Five individuals from the gathered fifteen or so are still seated by the time the room is nearly empty and now nearly silent again. Only the ragged breathing of the messenger remains. Kakashi is halfway off of his cushion, but Danzo, the elders, and Sakura are all still seated with their hands folded politely in their laps. It looks for a moment that the power in the room is held evenly, but then one of the elder drops her face into her hands. Her partner shifts to hold onto her shoulder, shaking like a leaf. The lines shift suddenly with precise clarity.

Sakura turns her head to level an even gaze at Danzo’s impassive face. An agent, small, perhaps her own age, appears at his side. Kakashi’s hand strays to the empty holster at his thigh. Sakura waits another beat before her composure shifts and she stands, patting down her knees carefully and turning her head to Kakashi.

“The genin must be mobilized,” she tells him, voice loud in her ears though she knows she’s speaking softly. “They are not a force we can overlook. There are chunin no longer suited for combat, they should be used to assist in the defense and evacuation of the civilians. Children are the priority.”

Danzo’s voice cuts through the air. “Children cannot fight,” he says.

Sakura doesn’t need to have read his file. She has heard the worst of it, the bitter truth, the ugly reality, the necessary evil, and she knows a test when she hears one. Even so, her sister warns her _tread carefully_ with a chill behind her words. The girl turns her head. She is almost thirteen but now she wonders if she will live to see it.

“Children are the future,” she replies.

Danzo’s lips quirk. It’s slight, quick, but Sakura catches it. The boy kneeling next to him also catches it and it seems to unsettle him if how long he stares after the expression is gone is any indicator, which it must be. Sakura too has spent her whole life learning to read people. Rather than deal with him, she turns again to Kakashi.

“Can you find the chunin?” she asks. “They must be ready to move everyone.”

“No faith in our defenses?” Danzo asks, cutting in again.

Annoyance flashes through her but she doesn’t turn toward him, holding Kakashi’s gaze until he nods and vanishes. Only when he’s gone does she turn. “Every village, town, and smaller city between the sea and here has burned. Every single one of them. If you desire for this village to survive then it’s people must survive. Dead civilians lower morale, the common strength of a village, and live ones will be in the way. If you have any stock in this village, get your agents to help Kakashi. Mobile the genin. Get the people to safety.”

Danzo hesitates.

Sakura spins away from him and heads for the door. “That kind of hesitation will get us all killed.” _I don’t have time to play games with you old man, help or don’t_.

Behind her he chuckles softly before standing and rolling up his sleeves, revealing the unimaginable. Sakura glances at him once from the doorway. She doesn’t have to tell him she already knew, he can see it in her face, in the plain disgust, and knows that when the dust is settled she will be a problem but for now… for now the girl with invisible allies and too many secrets may just be the only thing keeping the village from total destruction.


	14. The Dead Sea

Sakura is almost to the hokage office balcony when the first blast hits and knocks her from her feet. It fills her ears with a piercing ringing. The light outside the office is unnatural, too bright for the evening, so she crawls toward it to get a better look. Gradually her hearing returns. The moment it does she wishes it hadn’t and she covers her mouth with her hand. Bile tears up her throat anyway. She does her best to swallow it, fails, vomits over the railing, squeezes her eyes shut, wishes it away. A cool hand touches the back of her neck. Haku’s voice murmurs in and out, drowned out by the wail that rises up.

A single unified scream made not by the intangible throats of the dead but by the sore throats of the _living_. It drives Sakura to her knees.

The unnatural light fades to a soft glow, deceptively gentle in the faded evening light, but Sakura knows that if she looks up again she’ll see the wall surrounding the village in shambles. The great bricks and wooden beams broken into debris. The bodies of the guards atop it when it exploded now pinned beneath it, their spirits aching for the relief of death as they twist their way from beneath the skin of their bodies. Beyond the fires, beyond the gate, beyond the voiceless cries of her people, rises a sea. Monsters, formless, pale, a writhing mass of bodies with no real shapes, oozes forward. With them comes death.

* * *

There are shadows stretching long from the hills into the valley below. Noon has passed. The sun is beginning to dip across the sky toward the horizon, just the barest sliver of gold fire where the light hits the sea. The activity in the village, hundreds of people swarming like ants, does not come to a rest even as darkness begins to settle around them. Lanterns are lit and hung from posts. In the dusk and from a distance, the village must appear as thousands of flickering fireflies. It will become their namesake. Up close it reminds too many of fires. They avert their eyes; they cannot work in the dark and the work cannot stop. Their fear drives them forward, leaves them almost senseless.

A tower, little more than beams, lies at the back of the village center to the massive gate rising up where the encircling foothills from the massive mountain at the back slopes down into softly rolling hills. The gate was the first thing the workers finished, the wall that boxes them in following it swiftly. It has been a long war.

There is screaming in the hospital. There are patients who freeze, transfixed, at the sound. It is not the screaming of a soldier missing a limb, undergoing an amputation, losing blood, waking from nightmares, not a mother mourning a daughter, or a son, or a spouse, not a father who is now the only remaining member of his family. It is not the wail of a widow or an orphan. It is not a death rattle. The nurses are covered in blood, faces full of sweat and folded inward in concentration. Then, like a storm breaking, a face clears. The screaming resumes, the thin wail of an infant. It is the first time in a long time, that the hospital falls under a spell of silence. The nurse cups the infant’s head and stares at its face. Its skin is red, splotchy with blood, face screwed up tight, taking its first breaths as a human being, and the nurse passes the infant off when her hands begin to tremble. It is the first life she has helped bring about. The mother sobs into her child’s head as it settles, exhausted. Her tears are good ones.

The nurse slips out the doors of the hospital room, the only building totally and wholly finished, and pulls her face mask down. The cover over her hair follows it. Then the gloves suctioned to her shaking hands, then the apron, then the calm moment where she has nothing else to shed and she stands in the busy hallway transfixed by the soft mumbling behind her. It is the unfamiliar sound of comfort.

“Haruno! Report!” a loud voice cuts through the calm.

She turns. Barreling headlong between the paralyzed patients and the relieved nurses is the head of the hospital herself, looking very much in a fine form with her wide stride and arms swinging at her sides. The girl, just past womanhood really, sighs. Tears are streaking down her face but she straightens her back and snaps her heels together in the face of her superior and very nearly slaps a salute to her forehead, but there’s no need for that anymore. There is no state of war to be managed, she is not on the field. This woman is not her general.

“Tsunade-sama,” she greets. “Minimal complications. Mother’s vitals are strong. Baby appears healthy, no abnormalities, excellent pulse, clean lungs. We’ve got our first child of peace,” she finishes in a weak whisper.

The woman’s face, normally stern and hard, crumples into relief and the softness of her round shoulders and the creases of her wrinkles show through for a moment. This woman has lived through more than one war. More than one period of peace. Outlived thousands of children much younger than her, helped birth more than a few of them, and still she towers over Sakura and looks soft enough to touch. Her sharp edges have faded. “That’s good,” she says, gentle, motherly, reaches out and plants a hand on Sakura’s head like she’s still small. “That’s good,” she repeats. “Good job.” Then she’s a whirlwind again.

Sakura watches her go with only a lingering regret, watching her teacher, her _friend_ , place a hand on her back. It gives off a faint green color, likely to ease swelling. They’re all older now. Their bodies are in bits and pieces, joints twisted, limbs broken, missing, and Sakura herself has a patch of shrapnel in her shoulder that couldn’t be dug out. The surgery might just make it worse, so she’s content. It hardly ever hurts anyway.

“Haruno-sempai?” one of the newer nurses, an observer for the birth, calls from the hallway.

Sakura turns. The man steps into the hallway with the fussy infant in his arms for her to inspect one last time, now pink and squealing and full of the kind of vibrance that she’s never really seen before. Sakura taps his chest gently with a green finger. The fluid’s been cleaned, his heart is still strong, his grip just fine, eyes clear, so she presses her palm to the side of its face very gently and wills this small, infinite bundle of possibilities to live. Get big, strong, and live. The nurse says nothing when the tears start up fresh, spilling down her face, and wordlessly takes the infant back to the exhausted mother. Sakura doesn’t bother to wipe her face. She lets the salt sting.

They’d never been particularly close, before the war anyway, but in the midst of the dead, the gravely wounded that wouldn’t last the night, the missing and unaccounted for, the ones half existing in a temporary-permanent state of trauma, news that Yamanaka Ino’s squad had all made it out had let something her chest unclench just a little. That same familiar face comes around the corner that very instant. There she stops dead. Sakura’s face is open in a way Ino has never seen. Vulnerable.

“Cover up, ghost girl,” Ino tells her, “your belly’s showing.”

Sakura turns her head, blinking, eyes glossed over in the flickering hospital light. The power is still unreliable. The wall is the priority. Sakura smiles. Ino’s face heats up, sours, turns roughly to the side and pinches, but it just makes her friend’s face light up. _Friends_. They’re _friends_.

 _Weird_ , Sakura thinks. Out loud she asks, “Are we still on for dinner?”

A grin steals over Ino’s face and she turns back, arms snaking out to grab hold of Sakura’s biceps which flex reflexively in response. It takes a second for her to breathe out through her nose. Ino waits. A flash of a gaping stomach, an arm protruding from the other side of a chest, red. Sakura touches Ino’s hands very gently and breathes. There are scars there, roping around one of her pointer fingers, one across her palm, one that sliced clean through the mess of veins right where the underside of her wrist and heel of her palm meet. There are scars, a crisscrossed defensive pattern, underneath Sakura’s gloves. There are invisible lines, pale silver, underneath their skin.

“Of course we’re on for dinner,” Ino tells her, whatever she was going to say before dead in her throat at the brief flash of terror that stole over her friend’s face. The grip on Sakura’s arms loosens but doesn’t disappear. It’s okay. It’s getting better. I’ll be okay, eventually.

They’ll all be okay.

Someday.

* * *

“Everybody down!” a disembodied voice screams.

Another chunk off the wall splatters across the streets, the bodies caught underneath them doing less than nothing to lessen the impacts that rock others from their feet and paralyze them with terror before the singular mass that rises up. It has many faces, thousands of arms, too many eyes. Or not enough. Quivering, it rises and sloshes up over the damaged wall and into the city. There it separates into smaller bodies, each moving quickly without the hindrance of bones or a solid form, suffocating the first few people they stumble upon by surging up and forcing them to the ground. There, people try to scream as the white fills their lungs. They drown.

Sakura slaps the back of her hand against her mouth. She’s never seen anything like this. There are ghosts rising up from the mass. Sakura realizes that she has no idea what it actually looks like, not when all she can see is the dusty purple of the beings trapped inside it, the spirits meshed together to be _part_ of it, their bodies rising and submerging, wrenching sideways, howling. It’s such a low sound that she can’t really even hear it. Instead, it echoes through her bones, makes her stomach churn, her knees weaken. Her skeleton is rattling inside her, turning to jelly.

Worse, Sakura can clearly see the mob of stuck-together souls catching others. She watches the old woman from the corner stare it down fearlessly, watches a wave crash down onto her, swallow her up, absorb her while she screams in surprise. This monstrosity is _eating_ the ghosts, devouring the people it catches body and spirit. Sakura has read every tactical report in the library. She knows a losing battle when she sees one.

“Retreat,” she whispers, hands raising to her face. “We have to…”

“Sakura?”

Kakashi has appeared from the task she set out for him but freezes at the sight before him. The white sea hasn’t reached very far into the village yet. There’s still time. Sakura takes a step back from the balcony’s edge, bumps into his chest, presses her trembling hands against her face. She can feel the warmth from his hands hovering just above her shoulders.

“Sakura?” he asks again.

“We have to go. Retreat. We… we can’t win this,” Sakura tells him, too horrified to stumble over her words, speaking slowly. It sounds like air being forced from her lungs. Like a sucker-punch. She can feel the way he tenses behind her but it doesn’t matter, nor does the way he opens his mouth to protest matter when she turns to stare at him with eyes shadowed by terrible understanding. The kind Kakashi has seen in general’s eyes, in the hokage’s. His protest dies in his throat.

“Should we evacuate?” he asks. The way he says it, tentative, unsure, tells her that if she said _no, leave them_ he would.

It frightens her then, in this moment, how fiercely she loves him.

“Yes,” she says instead. “Everyone who can move, everyone who can fight, the children, civilians, the gennin.” Her arm lashes out to catch hold of his wrist, eyes firm. “Anybody who can’t walk, Kakashi, leave them behind. We can’t afford to be slowed down. Not with this,” she gestures vaguely behind her at the sea that has reached the main strip, sloshed against the buildings, mowed down everything behind it, “chasing us.”

Kakashi hesitates, but he nods, looking anywhere but the white below. “Understood,” he says and reaches down to snatch her from her feet so that he can turn tail and flee, hands just too tight on her bicep and thigh. Sakura lets him, thankful she won’t have to try and run herself.

“Where are Naruto and Sasuke?” she asks.

“Safe for now,” he tells her. “They're with the teams being assembled.”

Sakura says, “We have to pull them back. They’ll get killed.”

“No kidding,” Kakashi wheezes and picks up the pace. They’ll make it. They have to.


	15. Uncertain, In Transit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took a long time to work through, but now I've written the end and worked out how the plot will progress. Which is exciting because I was as anticipatory and confused as the rest of you, but it's got a definite final direction now which I think you'll find fitting at least. Anyway, expect a chapter or two up sooner than the last update.

“What the hell are you talking about?” is the first thing Naruto demands when Sakura tells him they’re leaving the village.

There’s no time for this. “Just what I said, Naruto,” she tells him, calling over the squad heads, speaking lowly to them as they gather around her. “New mission,” she says, breaking right in, because they know who she is and when she says, “The village is lost. Evacuate everyone who can walk. Anyone who can fight. Just,” she pauses and presses through the shakes, “run.” She holds their gazes, small, barely dipping into puberty, white-faced, until they each nod and gather up their squads. The gennin give her looks, confused, questioning, but they follow their leaders.

“We can’t just _leave_ ,” Naruto tries again. Sasuke catches his shoulder, looking toward the front of the village where the first splashes of white can be seen.

“Yes we can, we _are_ ,” Sakura tells him, brushing past, casting about for Kakashi’s cloud-hair.

Naruto reaches out, grabs her arm, yanks her back. “No we _can’t_!” he shouts.

It’s odd, really, she thinks as something like ice seems to spill forth from inside her. Naruto can tell something is changing. He lets go. Sasuke is watching her now, dark eyes level. Sakura feels cold, detached, her fear falling away from her in layers. The turn her body makes toward Naruto seems to take an age, like a glacier moving forward across a plain, consuming everything in its path, like the sea that rises up behind her.

“Stay if you want,” she tells him, “but if you do, you’ll die.”

When she turns to follow after Kakashi, Naruto has nothing to say and hesitates even as Sasuke tugs at his sleeve to follow after her retreating back. Instead of moving, he stares at the oddly silent invasion. It moves toward them at a snail’s pace, unstoppable. He can’t see any survivors from where it came into the village. Can’t sense them either. Then he ducks his head, curses, and lets Sasuke pull him away from his village, his home, this _graveyard_. Quietly, he curses her.

He’s never begrudged her her people skills or how she’s always right, except right now he does and he hates her a little because, as the civilians flee through the underground passage constructed a few years back, he figures she’s probably got the right idea. Cold-hearted Sakura at the head of the procession with Kakashi and the clan heads stick kicking, is just trying to keep everyone safe. Naruto clings to Sasuke’s hand and Sasuke lets him. Clings back even, just a little, and stares at the back of his teammate’s pink head in the distance. Sasuke has always held a little bit of a grudge against her. Against the frankness she’s always employed, the sharp honesty he now sees was a gift, and the blurry picture of her he’s been trying to piece together since they first met grows a little clearer.

Haruno Sakura, the girl who can see ghosts, leading the whole village out from an invasion. Haruno Sakura, head held high, chin up, never wavers. Sasuke steps a little closer to Naruto and sighs when he catches a faint string of Naruto’s grievances.

They’ll have to talk, all four of them, team member to team member, eventually. Probably not till this is over. Probably not for a long while. Ahead of the pair of them, Sakura steps closer to Kakashi and catches hold of his sleeve. They’re boxed in by civilians and shinobi alike, squished like sardines, and she doesn’t have to worry about somebody seeing. He presses back gently and resists the urge to brush his hand across her head. They haven’t really spoken, haven’t had the chance, but he knows that Sakura is spooked, terrified even, and that something really, really bad has happened to make her white-faced and willing to reach out for even a scrap of affection. It drives a stake into his heart to know that she’s walking with him. She could have hung back, stayed with the boys, found someone else, an ANBU member, a clan head. Instead she refuses to let go of his sleeve and walks forward resolutely hoping, _praying_ , that the way ahead is clear and that nobody under her care dies.

“What happened?” Kakashi asks.

There’s so much noise, infants wailing, mothers shushing, frightened parents and separated partners searching for the rest of their tiny units, clan heads arguing, shinobi gossiping just to hide their fear, torches being lit as they descend farther into the darkness below. There’s no chance anyone will overhear them.

Sakura takes in a shaky break. “The… sea… it was _eating_ people. Ghosts.”

Kakashi’s feet almost fail him. “Eating ghosts?” he asks, voice distant. Disbelieving.

Sakura doesn’t begrudge him the feeling. She hardly believes it herself. “Just… swallowing them up. Killing people and snapping up their souls, it… It was like… like it was _alive_ ,” she whispers and turns to look at him, face half illuminated suddenly as a man a few feet ahead of them lights a torch. The walls are lined with them for just this kind of situation.

In that half-darkness, Kakashi’s face is shadowed and afraid. Sakura’s hand slips from his sleeve to clutch at his. He lets her.

“How can that be?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “I don’t…” It hits her suddenly and her face opens like a floodgate. “I don’t _know_.”

It’s a big deal, he knows and squeezes her hand gently. _It’ll be alright_ , he tries to say.

 _All your life you’ve always known everything_ , Sakura’s sister coos from the depths of her mind, uncoiling like the snake she is, slithering to the forefront with a voice that echoes. _Now you’re out of your depth. Practically powerless. How will you protect them now_? She demands, only half vicious.

Sakura’s lip trembles. She bites it till it bleeds. _I don’t know_ , she whispers back.

 _No_ , her sister agrees, _you don’t_. _It’ll cost you, sister._

 _I know_ , she replies. _That at least, I know._

* * *

Sakura leaves her shift just after three, folding up her dirty gown for the wash, leaving her mask and gloves for sanitation, and waving to the only secretary they’ve hired yet on her way out. The woman at the desk looks up from the impossible stack of paper and waves weakly. Tsunade has been unloading paperwork onto her again. Sakura feels only a little guilty not offering to help her, reminding herself again that she has plans. _She has plans_. God, Sakura hasn’t had plans in what? Six months? At least.

It feels good to be out of the hospital, getting some sunlight, a little fresh air. It feels like a wake up call. She stops just outside the door and breathes in deeply, noting the bustle around her, the height of the walls, how they’re nearly done. There are more buildings than she remembers. It’s been a busy six months.

Ino’s already at the restaurant when Sakura wanders in only a few minutes late and waves, nearly stumbling over her feet to make it to her friend. She slides into the booth only to find a warm mug of tea already there. She glances up.

“Is someone else joining us?” she asks.

Ino winks. “Nah. It’s for you.”

Sakura sighs so large that her body seems to deflate and she picks up the cup, grateful, and inhales. Jasmine. Her favorite. Ino remembered. She smiles at the blond and says, “This is nice. I haven’t been out of the hospital in—,”

“In six months? Yeah,” Ino drawls, waving her hand, “I _know_. That’s why we made _plans_.” She grins and takes a sip of her own tea, self-satisfied, crossing her legs underneath the table.

Sakura sighs and waves her hand. “I’ve been busy, things have been crazy. I mean, you _know_. You work there too.”

Ino squints at her from over the mug and settles it down, leaning forward with an accusing expression. “I do know. I know that you’ve been overworking yourself! And,” she continues over Sakura’s half-hearted protest, “that you’ve been taking on extra work, and,” she says, rising a little out of her seat to get a height advantage on Sakura, “you’ve been doing a bulk of Tsunade’s paperwork for her, _and_ ,” she finishes, “you’ve been doing extra training!”

Sakura slumps into her seat while Ino leans forward even further, squinting. “I’m _busy_ ,” she repeats. “I’ve gotta stay busy or…” she pauses and feels her face go blank. “I’m busy.”

Ino’s face twists. She falls back into her seat.

It’s not something anyone talks about. Nobody’s ready. Not yet. Sakura is itching under her skin for someone to talk to it about, somebody to listen, somebody to calm her when she wakes up reaching for a kunai she no longer wears strapped to her thigh breathing harshly in the dim light of the hospital dorms. There are no large hands to cover her shoulders with a voice that moves through her chest like thunder. Sakura shoves the thought from her mind. She meets Ino’s eyes only briefly before dropping them again and beginning the ritualistic way she twists her tea round and round nervously. She can feel Ino’s eyes on her.

“It’s already been a year,” she starts up again. “In a couple of years most of us will have moved on. Not all of us, sure but… the civilians, the kids.”

Ino waits, hands loosely wrapped around her mug, refusing to flinch or look away from the hunched slope of her friend’s shoulders or the way her bad hand still trembles. It’s been a year, but not every can be sewn up like a leg. Some hurts can’t be popped back into place. They aren’t as simple as braces, casts, a flick of the wrist and some chakra, or taking it easy and keeping weight off it. The way Sakura’s wrist clenches and she has to roll the joint, cracking it, rotating it until it moves the way she wants to again because the nerves are fried and her cartilage is gone to shit is proof enough of that to say nothing of her nightmares. When Ino was still shacking up with her, she remembered the dreams. The screaming. There’s a scar above her armpit, just below her collar bone, from Sakura. It hadn’t been intentional, just terrified disorientation and a brief period where she hadn’t recognized Ino, but it had marked the end of their relationship. Not right away, but the decline. After that it was all downhill.

“In a couple of years, somebody is going to tell me _it was years ago, you have to move on_ ,” Sakura was saying and this time Ino does flinch. The mug between her fingers wobbles. Sakura ignores it.

“And maybe they’ll be right,” she continues. “But how am I supposed to—to just _get over it_? How am I supposed to… to _forget_?” Her head drops into her hands and she holds it there, shaking wrist, scar from when the artery in her throat had been severed pulled taught, the last joint in her right hand’s pinky missing from a stray senbon.

Ino reaches her hand over the table and catches Sakura’s wrist, her good one, and squeezes gently but says nothing. They were together through the war, till just after. There’s nothing she can say now that she hasn’t said already, nothing that was enough to fill up the empty spaces, but she’s here now with a warm hand and a compassionate silence. Sakura’s bad hand wraps its creaking fingers around Ino’s, pinky just a little too short. They sit like that, tea growing cold, dusk overtaking the village in long purple shadows, for a while knowing they’re both waiting for something without knowing what or where to find it. Sakura pushes her hair back and sighs through her nose. Ino flicks the space just short of her nose.

“For what it’s worth,” she tells the other girl, “I wouldn’t want to forget _all_ of it,” and winks.

Sakura’s face grows bright and she shoves Ino’s hand away in disgust. “Honestly!” she complains loudly, sitting back against the booth. “You’re impossible! Is that all you ever think about?”

“Well,” Ino says, taking a hearty gulp of her lukewarm tea, “we did just survive a war.”

A bittersweet smile steals across Sakura’s face and she upends the last of her tea down her throat and laughs when she chokes on it. “That we did,” she agrees and beckons the waiter. “Alcohol?” she asks Ino.

The blond slaps the table and scoffs, “Of course _alcohol_ , who do you think I am?”

Dryly, “A drunk,” and then politely, “a bottle of sake please.”

The rest of the evening is shot in, well, shots. Sakura doesn’t dream that night which she counts as a win because no dreams mean no nightmares mean no screaming, or tears, or waking up clawing at her face, her arms, her chest. Instead she wakes up with a swollen tongue and a headache. There’s no work that day so she doesn’t even get out of bed and, instead, spends the whole day dozing in and out of dreamless naps, limbs heavy, no desire to do much of anything. It’s a cycle she’s been avoiding thinking about. She misses Haku.

“Maybe today,” she whispers to herself around noon. “Maybe he’ll come back today.”

She falls asleep dreaming about a half-remembered lullaby.

* * *

“Where will we go?” That’s Hiashi.

Sakura almost wishes he’d died among the other, less deserving shinobi as she and the last of the great clan leaders cluster around a weak fire. They’re miles away from the village now, nearly back above ground, but they can’t really stop and the most they can spare is two hours. Maybe three if they push it. Sakura doesn’t want to risk it. The civilians are sleeping soundly, twisting in their dreams, and the shinobi are sleeping in shifts, curled in on themselves. Sakura is planning, half of her own team refusing to speak to her.

“Somewhere far away,” Sakura tells him, exhaustion chipping away at her seemingly endless reserves of calm. She’s busy hoping Danzo died back in the village. Hopes his spirit got swallowed up too. It’s probably too much to hope for, Danzo being who he is, and Sakura is almost sure he’ll show up again. If only to haunt her.

“Somewhere far away,” he repeats. It’s the closest to a mocking tone she’s ever heard a Hyūga make.

As much as she wants to cover her face with her small hands and scream into the creased palms she will find there, screaming until her throat either goes raw or the clan leaders all go deaf in numb horror at the sound, she simply tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear. There’s a rattling in her chest, battering her from the inside out. There are no ghosts to haunt her here. They’ve been swallowed up. Sakura checks her wrist, timing her pulse, pale hands over translucent skin. Hiashi is scared, she can see it gnawing him from the inside out the same way her own fear is trying to skin her alive, and she tries very hard not to hold it against him. He has no other ideas, she knows. Nothing better to contribute.

A rustle in the bushes draws her attention. Sakura shoots to her feet, falls into a precise half-folded stance, ready to spring forward into what is sure to be her death, before she quite knows it. The clan leaders are half a step behind her. A muffled curse slips as a man, large in stature, hunched over, slips on a wet pile of leaves. Sakura stares down at the sprawled form of the toad sannin. She’s met him before of course, and he is no more impressive this time than the last time (she promised never to speak of it and does her best to block out the memory), and she sheathes the kunai she’s gripping in her bloodless fist.

“Jiraya,” she breathes. Suddenly she’s angry, rage prickling her skin, burning her up, her face flushed with it, and she stalks forward intent on shoving him over as he tries to regain his footing. “Where have you been?” she demands. “Where were you!?” _We needed you_ , she wants to accuse even as she knows, imperially, that the likelihood that his presence would have made a difference is slim. None.

She’s scared. She wants someone to blame and no one will blame her for it. Jiraya least of all, guilt etched into the wrinkles around his eyes. The lines around his mouth deeper. Sakura breathes out, chest shaking, lungs quivering, eyes stinging, and bows to him. _You’re here now_ , she thinks. Maybe he hears it. Maybe not.

A thought occurs to her.

“You’ve got a report?” she asks.

Jiraya nods. “The hokage…?”

Guilt nearly drowns her. It’s been what? A few days? Jiraya’s information network is good, but not that good, and of course he hasn’t heard. _Of course_ Sakura is the one to tell him. Part of her is glad he was swallowed up by the Sea.

“Dead,” she hears herself say. It builds in her belly, tension in the gut muscles, air pushed up her throat from her lungs, escaping the quiet clack of her teeth. It hits him, not a sucker punch but more like something Kakashi might throw when he can’t afford to miss. The sannin’s knees buckle, just a bit, just enough for her to see.

“I see,” he says and he does.

There’s no reason to feel like all those people are riding on her conscience, not those who died from the invasion, not those who were swallowed up, but they hover around her. Thousands of bodies, faceless, piled about. There are no ghosts to follow her so she imagines them up, imagines their limbs, twisted, pulled, mangled, blood so thick it looks black.

Sakura turns back to the gathered leaders. They’ve all gone slack too, numb with relief at the sight of a real authority figure. Jiraya is the closest thing to a hokage they have now. He knows it too if the way he looks suddenly awkward, too big, occupying too much space, drawing too much attention. She feels for him but it feels good to have all that focus off her. It feels good to have a moment to breathe, to relax, to think about something other than the impending doom that’s moving in steadily.

Later she’ll ask him about that thing she’s been kicking around since the exams and mention what are, at this point, the closest surviving thing to the third’s last will and testament. Now though, she abandons him to the wolves. There is more to her life than these… ghosts. These wolves. These _games_.

Naruto and Sasuke are, predictably, together. Sakura finds them easily enough by following the flickering trails of chakra she can sense spiking from them in nervous agitation, huddled next to each other under the same blanket near a fire surrounded mostly by genin. Entirely by genin, she corrects as she draws closer. The civilians managed to grab supplies, things from their homes, blankets mostly, small keepsakes, things on hand, tools, jackets, and have shared them easily. Without their shinobi they’d be defenseless, a fact they never forget, but this kindness stems more from empathy. Compassion. Everyone huddled in bedrolls, on the bare ground, near small fires, has lost something. Someone. No one here is without grief. Guilt.

Sakura hesitates. It’s clear from the chakra coming off him in waves that Naruto is still upset. Reasonably so, really, she tries to remind herself. She’s never giving them details, always keeping them in the dark, running them in circles, lying, misleading, and they must know it in some respect or another. She’s never made it easy to get close to her. To trust her. They do though, she knows. The knowledge doesn’t come without bitterness, flat and heavy in her throat, or without anger like copper in her teeth, or yearning like small forks of lightning flickering through her chest. She _wants_ them to trust her, wants to trust _them_.

It’s Sasuke, of course, who notices her. Dark circles smudge the pale skin under his eyes, drawing attention to the sickly pallor starkly contrasting the thick black hair that frames his face. There’s been no time to trim it and it twists in almost ringlets. Unwashed, it seems to float and cast shadows across his stony, apprehensive expression, the kind that reminds her that they can be like mountains those boys. If she doesn’t make the first move…

They could all be dead at any moment. Sakura sighs and steps forward.

Naruto glances up when Sasuke’s hand drifts over the his forearm, following his friend’s gaze to find her hovering uncertainly just outside the fire’s warmth. He tries to scowl at first, fixing her with a petulant look. It’s _hurt_. Naruto is hurt. Sakura did that.

“Naruto, I…” her voice fails her and her gaze drops to the fingers still perched atop Naruto’s jacket sleeve. How did they get so close, she wonders. How did they manage it? Why is it so hard for her when they make it look so easy? “There was no other way… you… you didn’t _see_ …”

“And you did,” Naruto spits then blanches. He regrets it an instant later, half rising to meet her at the edge of the light, then pauses. It’s like trying to tread lightly over broken glass. Was it always this hard?

Sasuke asks, hand still on his friend’s arm, “What did you see, Sakura?”

It’s always been easier to focus on him and she takes the opening gratefully, steadying herself with his pitch eyes and unfriendly mouth. It looks more neutral than usual. “The… the stuff… the sea, it… it was _eating them_ ,” she whispers, barely able to say it, acutely aware that the others settled close are staring at her. In the confusion and anxiety of the flight from the village, propriety has been lost. She hardly blames them.

“The… the ghosts?” Naruto asks.

Sometimes, when he isn’t playing class clown and resident bucket of nails, he manages to stumble onto the heart of things without even trying. It’s mystifying really, for him to just make the answers appear from nothing. Sakura envies it without any sense of guilt, impressed and jealous all at once.

“The ghosts,” she confirms and lets the silence that follows stretch.

They don’t really understand what that means, not when they can’t see the half formed shapes clawing for escape whenever they close their eyes, dull faces illuminated with horror and twisted into empty screams, but they understand that something important has transpired. Something unprecedented. Something that terrifies her beyond anything she has ever experienced, something that drives her to her feet and keeps her walking.

Caught in the muddle of shinobi switching sleep shifts, Kakashi watches his team soak in the tense silence. Naruto’s body softens, twists toward Sakura, his left hand loosely clutching Sasuke’s sleeve. Sasuke’s eyes travel across Sakura’s face, examining it. Memorizing it. Softer than they usually are, bitter too, but close to compassionate.

Kakashi turns away and scratches the back of his head before meandering back through the sluggish crowd of people, vanishing toward the cluster of leaders and Jiraya. He doesn’t see Sakura’s eyes tracking him, watching him go. He doesn’t see the way her body shifts, desiring to follow him, but stays rooted in place and turns firmly toward her other teammates. He can’t hear his own voice echoing between her ears.

“Ah!” Jiraya clamors. “Hatake-kun!”

“Jiraya-sempai,” he greets, saluting him, “yo.”

“It’s been a while,” Jiraya grumbles, patting the ground next to him, “and I wish we were meeting again under better circumstances.”

Kakashi takes the spot and inclines his head to the leaders. “So do I.”

“About your student…”

“Sakura-chan, huh?”

“She’s…?”

“A Haruno heir, yes. She has the bloodline.”

“Ah. I see. No wonder…”

“…yeah.” _No wonder_.


	16. Envoys

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are only a few chapters after this, but given how hard they've been for me to write I'm taking a break to go back and revise previous chapters to raise the quality and iron out the confusing bits. I've found that the skipping about, while it makes sense to me, isn't done well enough for you guys. I'll make that less confusing.
> 
> This chapter is unfinished and will remain so until I finish the revisions, but I'm posting it regardless to give you this note so please feel free to read it while I work on the other bits. Hopefully, it gives an indication of where the story is headed.
> 
> Anyway! Happy New Year! Apologies about the gaps in updates. The work will be back on track soon.

“That’s as good a will as any I s’pose,” Jiraya agrees, rubbing the back of his head.

They’re two days from Konoha. The civilians are dead on their feet but beginning to adjust to the grueling pace Sakura is still refusing to relax from, the elders on her side for once keeps her voice above the din of the refugees. That’s what they are now. Refugees seeking asylum, if any is to be found.

“You’ll take him?” Sakura asks. There’s no time to reconcile. This is too important.

Jiraya makes a face but sighs, bracing himself with a palm against each knee. “Prolly should’ve taken him sooner,” he admits. “So yeah, I’ll take him.”

She silently agrees. She’s seen his apartment with the creaking, splintered floorboards, the patched windows boarded up with sheets of metal, the graffiti across his door, the lightbulb he carried around to each room he was in when he didn’t have the money to replace the broken ones. Jiraya should have taken him under his wing years ago. Even so.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “You have to find her. If you don’t find her or if she’s dead already…”

He holds up a hand. Sakura stares at the creases there. Jiraya is old, well on in his years for all his exuberance hides it, but she can see the obvious signs on his palms where the wrinkles form deep creases. “It’s Tsunade we’re talking about. I doubt she’s dead. She’ll outlive me, that’s for sure. Out of spite too,” he trails off, glancing away as if reliving some embarrassing memory. Or a bittersweet one, maybe.

“When do you leave?” she asks.

“Now,” he replies, standing.

She nods. “Good. There’s no time to waste.”

For a long moment he just eyes her, hands braced comfortably on his hips, casting a faint shadow in the early morning light, then he nods and glances over the thousands of sleeping heads toward the steady thrum of his new student’s chakra. “No,” he agrees,” there really isn’t.”

Naruto and Jiraya are gone before the sun’s risen all the way over the ridge.

Sakura eats boiled root stew with a surly, defeated Sasuke. Kakashi is out scouting. She glances at her teammate and sighs because they haven’t really had time to process the… admission. The truth she let slip. The unspoken, begrudging respect and trust it created even as he cradles bitterness close to his chest. Now though, there’s no buffer. Jiraya’s mission is pulling Naruto farther from them with each passing minute, tugging at their tenuous bridge and the wall of silence they’ve been building over the last month.

“Jiraya took him to find—,” she tries.

“Naruto told me,” Sasuke grunts.

Of course, she thinks. “I’ve made arrangements for us,” she says, stabbing a thick slice of root she doesn’t recognize, “for training.” It rings hollow, authoritative. I’ve made arrangements. Who am I? His mo—,

Sakura stuffs the root slice in her mouth and quickly lifts the bowl so she can swallow a mouthful. She nearly chokes on it. Sasuke shifts, settling his full bowl between his knees. There’s something dull there in that motion, defeated, tired, and it makes Sakura want to chew glass rather than have to look at it. She’s not Naruto, it’s true, but… we’re teammates too, Sasuke, she thinks. We’re…

“What arrangements?” Sasuke asks, brushing his hands through his hair. There are circles under his eyes, deeper with each restless night. They look like bruises.

“ANBU,” Sakura tells him and finishes her stew. When a hand reaches for her bowl and chopsticks she relinquishes them thoughtlessly, aware of the tight supplies the camp is working off. Their lodgings are still bare earth and trees overhead. They’ve reached the forest, headed toward Wind country. It’s a mistake, she thinks. They should head for the sea. They should get across it, away from the other, more dangerous Sea, should start anew on another continent in another country under another name. Konoha died with the invasion. Something new will have to replace it.

“ANBU, huh,” Sasuke muses. “How did you manage that?”

Honesty. Honesty even if it hurts. Even if it grinds like salt, like sand, rubbing raw. “They’ve been training me since I was younger,” she tells him.

“Huh,” is all he says.

Maybe it’s a win. Maybe not. It sounds like he’ll go to training with her.

Later, in a tight circle, Sakura says, “We have to send envoys. Find out if there are other… invasions. If anyone else is safe or…” she rubs her hands together. “Locate survivors of the villages, if there are any, find somewhere to go.”

“I agree,” a new, unexpected voice interjects.

Sakura refuses to look up at the not entirely welcome appearance of Danzo. She isn’t not relieved, but he brings with him unpredictable agents. Unknown motives. She wishes he’d burned in the village.

It would have been simpler.

* * *

_The smaller countries to the south have been decimated. Cause unknown. The damage, not present in the invasion in Konoha, suggests a different enemy. Infighting, perhaps. Or another player not yet revealed._

_Horse_

* * *

_Wind country hasn’t been touched yet but they’re aware of the dangers. Their borders are tight but allow entry under guard. The child from the Sand invasion, the kazekage’s son, has replaced his father as kazekage. He seems reasonable._

_Sparrow_

* * *

_Lightning is preparing for war. Highly suspicious. Narrowly avoided capture and detention. Would have been subjected to torture, most likely. Exercise caution if approaching._

_Tortoise_

* * *

_Discovered some survivors. A band of about twenty. Suffering from shock. Appear mostly uninjured, willing to cooperate. Glad to see another living person, I think. Bringing them back to the pre-specified location for shake-down and quick interrogation._

_They have information about the group that burned the villages. Some of them anyway. Villages that is. They all have lots to say._

_Will require further briefing._

_Rat_

* * *

“Messages?” Sasuke asks.

“Reports,” she tells him, handing over the small scraps of paper without a second thought. Sasuke is her teammate. They have to trust each other or they’ll…  _There has to be somewhere safe,_ she thinks while not thinking about him.

“Survivors,” he murmurs, interrupting her thoughts.

“Hopefully they’ll have something useful about whoever set those fires,” Sakura sighs, stretching out her legs. It sounds doubtful, even to her. Sasuke eyes her, watches the way her back twists back as her bones crack, the way her leg shakes when it extends, the way she pinches her face when her hands touch her hips lightly. They’re four days from Konoha. The messengers Sakura sent out were the fastest still living, some previously of ANBU, others reinstated, and a select few field-promoted. The rest of the shinobi are training. They’re pitted against each other, worn down, every weakness exploited by their trainers. It isn’t always the best way to go with some students, but Sakura was trained by ANBU. It’s the only way she knows.

Danzo seems oddly pleased with the regimen change, something she should approach warily and takes with a grain (or a bucket) of salt.

The morning is well behind them and they’ve stopped for the afternoon. Since entering the forest the days are longer, summer in full swing, and the civilians move in groups now rather than all together to keep up morale and help regulate sleep schedules. They’re weary. Their faces drawn, hard, lean. Exhaustion and hunger keep them from using their superior numbers against the shinobi, that and the terror that without their counterparts they’re helpless. The gap in power is astonishing, something he hadn’t really ever seen before. It’s… distressing, the hopelessness, the helplessness he can see in their faces. The envy when the shinobi train.

“Maybe,” he finally answers Sakura. “You know… we should start to train the civilians.”

Sakura doesn’t look at him, her face even, placid even, but her eyes are fixed somewhere in the dirt by her feet and her shoulders are forcibly relaxed. “I know,” she tells him and rubs her face. She too has dark shapes under her eyes.

It’s a burden. A risk. Sakura addresses the leaders later. “We need everyone able to fight. What if we get ambushed? We lost a lot of…” Soldiers. Fodder. Defenses. “We lost a lot in the invasion.”

They try and argue. Red-faced, spittle-spitting, but they have no real arguments. They’re throwing words. Shinobi is an honorable title. Civilians aren’t deserving of it. All Sakura hears is pretentious elitism, something that will not serve them if they are to survive. Leaders all across the continent have fallen because of arrogance. Sakura has heard their stories, marked their failures. She knows the strategies. The battle plans. The follies.

“Enough!” she shouts suddenly, standing. “There aren’t enough of us for a suitable defense! How else will we remedy that!?” she demands.

Back-talking the hokage was never so hard even though he held the final word on her head and whether or not it left her shoulders, but her silence will cost them. Deep in her head she can feel her sister’s attention. It shifts, like the webbing of a screen coming into focus, an invisible gaze focused on her with unsettling intensity. Her sister is not necessarily an ally. She never has been. They are symbioses, thrust together by circumstance or fate, coexisting.

 _Tread carefully_ , _sister dear_ , she whispers in Sakura’s ears.

The time for careful is over. “Either grow our reserves or—,”

“Or we’ll perish,” Danzo interrupts. “This is a game of survival now. There is no room for politics or petty grievances anymore.” He’s been quiet till now, soaking up the idle and mostly useless chatter. Sakura’s upset has caught his attention.

She wishes desperately it hadn’t.

* * *

“How are we gonna find her?” Naruto asks the second day away from the refugees. Away from his team. Sasuke. They’ve been keeping longer sleeping hours being smaller in number and less of a target, so he’s more awake on his feet now, more aware, the neurons sparking.

Jiraya is quiet for a moment, somewhere else. “Hm?” he asks a moment later, returning, turning his head to stare at Naruto for a moment, recollecting himself. Then he turns away and stands. They’ve lingered too long again, time ticking perilously away. They’re six days from Konoha.

“I was keeping tabs on her so I know where she was six days ago,” he tells Naruto as the boy, clearly exhausted, ashen, stumbles to his feet and winces when he feels the blisters through his quickly wearing down sandals. The pace is brutal and his stamina not endless. The beast in his belly is quiet, sensing the urgency with which things are moving around its host, senses the severity of the situation. Naruto must become stronger or he will die. If Naruto dies then… The beast refuses to heal such tiny wounds, hopes they will harden, keep the boy’s feet tough. Hopes for the best, for survival. For retribution.

They pause about noon, escaping the high summer sun by making a dash for a far tree line, spreading a map Jiraya pulls from inside his coat on the cracked dirt they crouch on. His fingers linger on the pipe stashed there. A good smoke would calm his nerves but he’s caught the boy wrinkling his nose, bad memories stirring, remembering an even older man hunched over a desk and fixing him with a hard stare. Jiraya resists because he has those memories too and he’d rather leave them buried. They haunt him often enough at night.

Instead he points to a small cropping of trees and says, “This is us, here,” then draws his finger up a jagged red line, “and these are the mountains we’ll pass through.”

Naruto studies the map, concentration and silence uncanny and, from what he’s gleaned from both Kakashi and his unnerving young student, uncharacteristic. When he speaks, he asks, “Where are we tryin’ to go, anyway?” and squints at the map. He taps a town not far from them, a thin cluster of buildings on the map near the thick river that runs through the flatlands. “Here?”

Jiraya eyes the boy but agrees, “There. That’s where my sources say she last was.” Again his fingers itch for the pipe, his least distressing character trait was his smoking and he learned it from a man whose worst was the insatiable red glow at the end of his pipe. Clenching his hands into fists and opening them slowly, he works his way through the itch. “The, what does your teammate call it?” he pauses, scratches his head, “The Sea?” continues when the boy nods, “The Sea hasn’t been spotted out here yet, but it’s probably heard about it. The town’s probably abandoned, but she’s nearby I’d say. Likes to travel at her own pace.”

The town is above Konoha, situated to the west, well out of the path that the Sea carved through the country. A path which took it over the daiymo’s palace. Dead leadership meant that the shinobi were now in control of the country’s interests by way of vacancy and, unofficially, martial law had been declared. It had really, in all ways but spoken. Jiraya scratches his chin, wonders when he shaved last, wonders when they’ll have a decent meal again. Wonders when Naruto will stop surprising him.

It isn’t likely to happen in his lifetime, he realizes, noting that it’s gotten shorter since last he thought about it. A lifetime coming quickly to an end. An era on its last legs. A number of elders perished in the flight from the village, others still will perish on the journey, and then only the young will be left to continue on. The future will come to be. Somehow it always seemed to far away, like he would continue on and on and all things would always be as they were and time would never really pass. Jiraya has lived his whole life like this, so sure that tomorrow would resemble yesterday. Now though, Naruto is growing up tough. A weed that won’t come out, headed steadily for the sun. Now though, Sasuke resists temptation and shatters the cycle that has forced betrayal and darkness on the village since before its conception. Now though, a Haruno bears the sight. Bears witness to the unseen, the unthinkable, and stands before the onslaught.

The future is upon them and Jiraya is sure, suddenly, in a way he was not before, that he will not live to see it through.

Tsunade, somewhere not far off, is gripping a cup with shaking hands and swallowing down the same feeling as her assistant huddles in the growing shadows as the sun beats down. Neither, despite the heat, feels warm. A chill, carried by terrified refugees and scouting reports, has swallowed up any hope of casting out the gloom. Instead they rest quietly. They are days from Konoha, even if they wished to reach it, but Tsunade can feel a familiar chakra signal in the distance. A tiny pinhead of comfort that draws closer, bringing terrible news no doubt. Wrapping her arms about herself, Tsunade leans against a gnarled mess of tree roots and waits for the inevitable.

The day wears on and less than two hours later she sees his face appear in the distance, ragged, wilting in the sun, eyes dark. He too, feels the cold hand that compresses his chest. Next to him stands a boy, blond, his chakra warm like dappled sunspots from beneath water, reassuringly steady even as he wavers on his feet from exhaustion. Tsunade stares at him as they draw closer and thinks he looks like someone else she knew. A sharp twist in her chest is ignored as she rises, lines in the corners of her eyes, around her mouth, heavy shadows slated across her skin, and Jiraya draws up short of the makeshift camp. She can see it in his eyes. She’s beautiful, as beautiful as she always was, though the thought warms her little, but it eases the ache in her shoulders some and she stands straighter.

“The old man is dead,” Jiraya says.

No need to ask which old man. Their old man, their teacher, their friend. A father, a leader. Theirs. Tsunade’s knees don’t buckle, her eyes don’t water, her hands don’t shake. A soft bubble of air escapes her. The chill in her bones grows, a frost she can’t shake, and she nods. Of course the news was bad.

“How?” she asks. The softness of her voice throws him, she can tell, but it seems as bad as everything else.

Jiraya closes his eyes. “There was… an invasion. Something… something, swallowed it up.

It. The village. Tsunade nods again, reasonable, measured, hands steady. Her home. Her home though she’s been away for so long. The boy’s face pinches. She’s forgotten that kind of agony, the kind that fills up the faces of children who’ve lost everything, and she stares at him because he looks like someone she knew. A couple of someones. He looks like his father, like his mother, and like… she turns back to Jiraya.

“Why are you here?” she asks.

“You’re the next hokage,” he tells her.

The boy’s head jerks up, surprised.

“You’re joking,” she tells him. “I refuse.”

Jiraya shakes his head. “You can’t.”

“The hell I can’t—,”

“You _can’t_. The old man asked for you, specifically, by name, and if you don’t then… Danzo will.”

Tsunade's face sours, stony and angry, but she doesn’t argue again. Instead her hands clench and unclench, furiously moving as she works through her thoughts, but there’s really nothing to think about. She’s buying time. Danzo can’t… he can’t be allowed to take power.

“What about you?” she asks him.

“He asked for _you_ ,” Jiraya mumbles.

It might sound like an excuse, but it isn’t. It’s bad luck, after all, to deny dying old men their last wishes. Tsunade sighs.

* * *

They are thirteen days from konoha. Naruto and Jiraya have yet to return. Sasuke is restless. Sakura is practicing her forms, draining her chakra, searching desperately for any trace of her companions and furious when she comes up empty. It eats at her, chewing her up and spitting out bones she knows she doesn’t have. An endless pile of ribs pulled out from her chest. Sakura can’t think, can’t focus, can’t pretend like nothing’s wrong, so she trains.


End file.
